Allied (2016)

16 Friday Dec 2016

Tags

Action, Brad Pitt, Drama, French Morocco, Jared Harris, Marion Cotillard, Review, Robert Zemeckis, Spy, Thriller, World War II

D: Robert Zemeckis / 124m

Cast: Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard, Jared Harris, Simon McBurney, Lizzy Caplan, Daniel Betts, Camille Cottin, August Diehl, Matthew Goode, Thierry Frémont, Anton Lesser

French Morocco, 1940. Max Vatan (Pitt), a Canadian officer attached to the British army, is on a mission to assassinate a Nazi ambassador. He rendezvous’s with a French resistance fighter called Marianne Beauséjour (Cotillard). Posing as a married couple, they obtain an invitation to a party that will be attended by the ambassador and several other high-ranking Nazi officials. In the meantime, their posing as a married couple begins to awaken in each of them feelings for the other. When the mission is over, Max and Marianne realise they have fallen in love; he asks her to come to London so they can marry. After a few months waiting for the red tape to be worked through, Marianne is allowed to join Max, and when she does she reveals that she’s expecting their child.

With their child, a girl, born during an air raid, Max and Marianne’s life begins to settle down into a more sedate existence. With Max rumoured to be in the running for a promotion, he’s called in one day by his superior officer, Frank Heslop (Harris). Frank introduces him to an S.O.E. operative (McBurney) who wastes no time in telling Max that they suspect Marianne is a German spy. Max refuses to believe it, but he’s charged with aiding the S.O.E. in their investigation. He has to receive a telephone call later that night, write down the details of the call and leave them where Marianne will see them, and then wait forty-eight hours until the S.O.E. will know one way or the other if the details have been transmitted to Germany. And there’s a further catch: if Marianne is revealed to be a German spy, then Max has to be the one to kill her.

Despite being told not to, the next day Max decides to launch his own investigation. Aiming to prove Marianne’s innocence, he tracks down a British officer (Goode) who knew her before Max did. But the officer is unable to help him. At a party they’re hosting that night, Max sees Marianne talking to an old man (Lesser) he doesn’t recognise; the man turns out to be a jeweller, but Max’s suspicions are increased. With time running out, Max has no option but to travel to Occupied France and seek out the one man he’s certain can tell him if Marianne is who she says she is, a resistance fighter named Paul Delamare (Frémont). He finds the man in gaol, and learns something about Marianne that will answer the question of her guilt or innocence once and for all.

Some directors – many, in fact – have careers that initially show a lot of promise, are very successful once they’ve made four or five movies and have become internationally well-known, but then find their later projects failing to attract both the same audience levels and continuing critical acclaim. Robert Zemeckis is just such a director. Used Cars (1980) is a great, largely unsung comedy that features one of Kurt Russell’s best performances. The Back to the Future trilogy cemented his place in movie history, and Forrest Gump (1994) reinforced his stature as a mainstream director. But since then, and with the possible exception of Cast Away (2000), Zemeckis’ output – including three excursions into the world of performance motion capture – has been less than stellar, and The Walk (2015), a movie that looked as if it could arrest the slow decline in Zemeckis’ career, proved not to be up to the task.

And sadly, with Allied, Zemeckis has still to reverse that decline. Working from a tired, ineffective screenplay by perennial under-performer Steven Knight, Zemeckis has tried to make an old-fashioned romantic drama that harks back to classic wartime movies such as Casablanca (1942), while also presenting said drama with a more modern visual sheen. The mix, though, doesn’t aid a movie that is difficult to engage with, and which never does enough to make you care about either Max or Marianne. With no one to root for, Knight’s screenplay becomes a matter of pushing the basic storyline through to an incredibly unsatisfactory ending, one that will have audiences shaking their heads in disbelief (though there are plenty of other occasions where they’ll be doing this as well). And Zemeckis, a director whose visual acuity shouldn’t be in doubt, doesn’t seem able to enhance the narrative in any meaningful way, leaving Don Burgess’s cinematography to look and feel as tired as everything else – which is an incredible thing to realise, as Burgess is Zemeckis’ usual DoP, and has lensed non-Zemeckis movies such as Enchanted (2007) and The Book of Eli (2010).

Against this surprisingly dour visual backdrop, Pitt and Cotillard are left “holding the bag” as they try to inject a sense of immediacy into proceedings, and also try to convince the audience that they’re involved in a great love affair. Thanks to Knight’s script, though, neither star has a chance, as they’re hampered by some awful dialogue – “There’s a thing called the soul. I’ve looked into her soul.” – and the kind of motivations that don’t sound credible once they’ve been said out loud. Cotillard fares better than Pitt, but that’s only because she has less to do. Left stranded by virtue of having to carry the movie’s second half on his own, Pitt looks pained and unhappy, and though this could be attributed to his character’s state of mind, it always seems more likely that it’s a reflection of the star’s awareness that the movie isn’t turning out as well as it should.

The rest of the cast pop in and out of the narrative, often for one or two scenes, and fail to make any impact. Harris is the kind of gruff, good-natured senior officer we’d all like to think existed at the Ministry of Defense, McBurney plays an historical predecessor of the role he portrayed in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015), and Caplan is tucked away at the back of a few scenes as Max’s (apparently) openly lesbian sister, Bridget. While some of these characters are important in terms of moving the story forward, none of them have any depth, and again, thanks to Knight’s tortuous way with dialogue, none of them sound convincing (check out the dialogue Harris is stuck with in the movie’s denouement).

With Zemeckis bringing very little to the project other than his name and an occasional flash of the visual style that he’s most famous for, it’s difficult to work out what attracted him to the project, and very seriously, why he completed it. Coming so soon after The Walk, perhaps he didn’t have as much prep time as he’s used to. Perhaps the initial concept became altered and irretrievably lost during production, leaving Zemeckis stuck with seeing it through. Perhaps he did, genuinely feel that this was a project that he could make an entertaining, thrilling, exciting movie out of. Whatever the reason for his participation, this leaden, dreary, unappealing movie is the result, and it does the man and his career no favours at all.

Rating: 5/10 – yet to recoup its $85 million budget at the international box office, Allied is a movie that tests its audience’s patience, and gives it very little to care about; a dismal experience overall, and a reminder that the combination of a big name director and big name stars doesn’t always guarantee good value or an entertaining couple of hours.

Rogue One (2016)

15 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Action, Adventure, Alan Tudyk, Ben Mendelsohn, Darth Vader, Death Star, Diego Luna, Felicity Jones, Gareth Edwards, Jyn Erso, Prequel, Rebel Alliance, Review, Sci-fi, Star Wars

aka Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

D: Gareth Edwards / 133m

Cast: Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Alan Tudyk, Donnie Yen, Wen Jiang, Ben Mendelsohn, Forest Whitaker, Riz Ahmed, Mads Mikkelsen, Jimmy Smits, Alistair Petrie, Genevieve O’Reilly, James Earl Jones

Rogue One is like the bride at a wedding: it’s got something old – an implied storyline from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope; something new – characters we haven’t seen before; something borrowed – the plot of Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi; and something blue – Donnie Yen’s contact lenses. It also has a hard time deciding what kind of Star Wars movie it wants to be, whether it’s closer in spirit to Episode IV, or thanks to the technology employed, nearer to the look and feel of Episode I. With no clear decision made, the movie ends up being neither; instead it equates itself as an awkward mix of the two, where the perceived low tech of Episode IV clashes with the confused storytelling of Episode I. Make no mistake, this is a Star Wars movie, but it’s an amalgam of moods and irregular narrative necessities that stop it from becoming as impressive as it wants to be.

We’re in trouble right from the start, with a prologue that introduces us to Death Star designer and loving father Galen Erso (Mikkelsen). Having helped the Empire to begin building their big, bad planet killer, Erso has somehow managed to get away with his wife, Lyra, and young daughter Jyn, and avoid detection on a remote, largely uninhabitable planet. But big, bad Empire honcho Orson Krennic (Mendelsohn) has found him, and plans to take Galen back with him to help finish building the Death Star. Soon, Lyra is dead, Jyn is hiding in a hole in the ground, and Galen is whisked off to continue in his task of facilitating the Empire’s desire to commit repeated intergalactic genocide. Later, Jyn is discovered by half-human, half-tin man Saw Gerrera (Whitaker), and taken under his resistance fighter wing.

There are several things wrong with this sequence, and they’re indicative of the problems the rest of the movie has to try and cope with (and largely unsuccessfully). First there’s the matter of the Death Star itself, which is still being built at this point, and which needs Galen’s presence in order to be completed. This begs the question, is the Death Star being built bit by bit as Galen comes up with the design bit by bit, or has he designed it all but there’s no one else who can understand what his design entails? And then Lyra, who has initially fled with Jyn, leaves her daughter, faces down Krennic with a blaster, and is killed for her trouble by his guards, making her death entirely pointless. Jyn sees all this and runs and hides in the aforementioned hole in the ground that is camouflaged by a large, fake rock. And while Krennic’s guards look for her, and are right next to where she’s hiding, we witness Jyn peering out through a gap in the “rock” – a gap that allows us to see her eyes and nose, and which even blind Jedi disciple, Chirrut Îmwe (Yen), could have spotted. But she remains there until Gerrera arrives to save her – even though there’s no reason for him to know she’s there in the first place.

There are more illogical steps throughout, and as it progresses the movie becomes more and more confusing, and narratively complex, as the plans for the Death Star require the Rebel Alliance – in the form of Cassian Andor (Luna), his robot sidekick, K-2SO (Tudyk), Îmwe and his friend, Baze Malbus (Jiang), and later, Empire pilot turned rebel Bodhi Rook (Ahmed), and not to mention a now adult Jyn – to trek here, there and seemingly everywhere in their efforts to track down a copy of its plans, and so enable the rebels to have something to do in Episode IV (when they’re not playing second fiddle to a farm boy, a scoundrel, an old man and a Wookiee, not to mention the wheezy guy in the black helmet who pops up here a couple of times).

In the process of this search, mistrust between characters is overcome, an old villain (not Vader) makes a semi-welcome return (you might be excited until you get a closer look at him), battles are fought, lives are lost and/or sacrificed, stormtroopers are dispatched by the bucket load, good triumphs over evil, and the whole unconvincing mishmash of ideas dovetails nicely into the beginning of Episode IV. There are a couple of standout moments: Vader taking his red lightsabre to a corridor full of unlucky rebels, Îmwe’s martial arts takedown of a dozen or so stormtroopers (it’s always good to see Yen in action), and though they’re sometimes blatant (though also necessary) in their placement, there are plenty of riffs and pre-echoes of events in Episode IV to keep the fans happy.

Ultimately it’ll be the fans who will take this installment of the re-ongoing Star Wars franchise to their hearts, but for newcomers to the saga, or even those who are keen to see what all the more recent fuss is about, this will be a bit of a struggle. Part of the problem is that no matter what obstacles are put in the way of Jyn and the rebels, we all know the outcome. With a pre-ordained conclusion ahead of us, it’s also difficult to care about any of the characters, despite the best efforts of a cast who aren’t exactly lightweights. But Luna is too earnest; Jones runs him a close second; Tudyk contributes yet another robot-with-attitude performance (why do robots have to have an attitude?); Yen and Jiang make for a great, if underused, team; Mendelsohn vacillates between scowling menace and angry outbursts in a fruitless search for something to make Krennic more interesting as a villain; Whitaker and Mikkelsen both lack for screen time and never overcome their minor character status; Ahmed does wide-eyed and shell-shocked for too long; and the great James Earl Jones is brought in for a scene where, unfortunately, Vader’s dialogue only serves to muddy the waters of what’s happening even more than they’re muddied already.

With the script – by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy – moving safely from one join-the-dots scene to the next, and providing little in the way of depth, Rogue One has to fall back on its visuals, and in that respect, the movie holds a little potency. There’s still no one shot that will invoke awe or a sense of wonder (like the Star Destroyer taking up more and more room at the top of the screen at the beginning of Episode IV), and while there’s plenty of beautiful moments to take in, even the Death Star at one point emerging from hyperspace, there aren’t quite enough to make this installment stand out from the rest.

As a so-called stand alone movie, Rogue One doesn’t fit the bill, as it’s too busy reminding everyone of its connection to the series’ opener, and as an additional entry to the franchise timeline, it’s further entrenched in the overall story arc. In charge of it all, Gareth Edwards does a great job of arranging all the elements (even if he can’t overcome the clumsiness that comes with them), and he ensures that the movie hits the required number of beats on time and to its best advantage, but this is still Star Wars-by-numbers, a functional if unnecessary addition to the series, and if it doesn’t tarnish the legacy of the overall franchise, it still doesn’t quite add anything to it either.

Rating: 7/10 – superficially entertaining with its blockbuster mentality and slick, professional appearance, Rogue One lacks the heart and charm of the original trilogy, and plays out its tale efficiently and with any emotion firmly kept in check; a movie then that mimics the series’ best values without appreciating or embracing them fully, and which should leave the impartial viewer feeling more than a little let down by it all.

Xmas Classics – The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

14 Wednesday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Budapest, Comedy, Drama, Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Morgan, James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan, Matuschek's, Review, Romance, Xmas Classics

D: Ernst Lubitsch / 99m

Cast: Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart, Frank Morgan, Joseph Schildkraut, Sara Haden, Felix Bressart, William Tracy, Inez Courtney, Charles Smith

The first thing to know about The Shop Around the Corner, is that, for roughly the first nineteen minutes, it’s set during the summer. There’s not a snowflake or jingle bell in sight. There’s just Matuschek’s gift store, and the people who work there, waiting for the owner, Mr Matuschek (Morgan), to open up the store for another day. There’s Pepi (Tracy) the errand boy, Alfred Kralik (Stewart), the senior sales clerk, and the other sales clerks: Mr Vadas (Schildkraut), Mr Pirovitch (Bressart), Flora (Haden), and Ilona (Courtney). Later, Kralik is approached by Matuschek with the idea of selling a musical cigarette box; Kralik dismisses the idea for a number of reasons, and Matuschek reluctantly acquiesces.

But Kralik hasn’t heard or seen the last of the musical cigarette boxes. When Klara Novak (Sullavan) comes to the store looking for work, it’s her impromptu sale of one of the boxes that gets her a job, Matuschek’s respect, and Kralik’s reluctant admiration. But a mutual animosity soon takes over, and Klara and Kralik bicker with each other over almost everything. By the time Xmas is just a couple of days away, nothing has changed between them, but the relationship between Kralik and Matuschek has. The store owner no longer takes Kralik’s advice, or delegates important work to him. A row over who should stay on after work on the window displays leads to Matuschek firing Kralik, and much to the dismay of everyone else.

Kralik leaves, dejected. The only positive thing he has going for him is a first date with a girl he’s been penpals with since before the summer. Their correspondence has led to this first meeting, but Kralik isn’t sure he should go, partly because he’s nervous, and partly because he’s feeling down. He takes Mr Pirovitch with him to the cafe where they’re supposed to meet, and gets him to see what his penpal looks like. Surprise, surprise, it’s Klara. Kralik goes in and acts as if he’s there by chance, and soon learns that Klara’s romantic idealisation of her penpal is so complete that he is regarded as far inferior in comparison.

Meanwhile, a major development involving Matuschek and the real reason for Kralik’s dismissal leads to the store needing a stand-in manager. Kralik takes on the role, much to everyone’s surprise (and relief), though Mr Vadas’ position has become untenable. With Xmas Eve upon them, Klara has arranged another meeting with her penpal, though she’s still unaware that the man of her dreams is also her boss. The only thing Kralik is unsure of is how she’ll react when she learns about his deception.

Well, we all know the answer to that one, don’t we?

The Shop Around the Corner, adapted from a stage play by Miklós László and scripted by Samson Raphaelson, is a sheer delight from start to finish, another feather in the cap of Ernst Lubitsch’s career that is as entertaining today as it was seventy-six years ago. From the opening scene where the staff at Matuschek’s gather outside the store, the viewer is treated to a mini-masterclass in characterisation, a narrative and acting shorthand that obviates the need for long stretches of dialogue. Each character is recognisable instantly, and with their individual quirks acknowledged from the start, from Mr Pirovitch’s amiable passivity to Ilona’s youthful, fun-loving exuberance, to Mr Vadas’s irritating peacock-like strutting. Stock characters, perhaps, but already the kind of characters the viewer knows they’re going to enjoy spending the next hour and forty minutes with.

And so it proves. With the further introduction of Mr Matuschek – gruffly pompous – and Klara – sweet yet determined – the roster of characters is complete, and the small matter of the central romance is instigated. Around this, Raphaelson’s superb script adds layer upon layer of throwaway moments, from Pirovitch’s disappearing every time Matuschek wants someone’s “honest opinion”, to Pepi’s impersonation of Flora on the telephone (to avoid carrying out an errand for Mrs Matuschek). There’s a wealth of little moments like this, all designed to add extra merriment to a romantic comedy that fizzes and sparks when its central characters are sparring (but not sparing) with each other. Sullavan and Stewart play their roles to perfection, she disparaging everything he does, while he tries to find a way of evening the score. Both actors are a pleasure to watch, never missing a beat – either comedic or dramatic – and Sullavan’s breezy demeanour is complimented by Stewart’s often bemused, distracted presence.

They’re matched by Morgan’s ebullient turn as Matuschek, his story arc taking a darker turn as the movie progresses. There’s a moment where Matuschek realises that he’s made a huge, dreadful mistake, and the actor’s mournful, disconsolate expression speaks volumes as to the depth of his misjudgment. What follows is the movie’s most dramatic, and most affecting moment. Lubitsch imbues this scene with a quiet power that allows it to linger in the memory long after the movie has concluded, and it’s a mark of his skill as a director that it in no way disrupts the otherwise sparkling dialogue and engaging narrative. The German émigré displays a tongue-in-cheek approach to the material and a stylish wit throughout (the so-called “Lubitsch touch”), and he finds nuances in Raphaelson’s screenplay that add further lustre to a movie that is funny, sad, uproarious, charming, elegant in its construction, and unrelentingly appealing.

Rating: 9/10 – a perennial favourite amongst fans of Xmas-based movies, The Shop Around the Corner is a movie that effortlessly raises the spirits and puts a lingering smile on the viewer’s face; undeniably entertaining, it’s like an old friend you haven’t seen in years but who also holds a very dear place in your heart, and once you’ve seen them, you can’t wait until you see them again.

Poster of the Week – Helena (1924)

13 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Avant garde, Edy Darclea, Helen of Troy, Historical epic, Movie poster, Paris, Poster of the week, Russia, Vladimir Gajdarov

The oldest item yet to feature on Poster of the Week, this Russian-made poster for the German silent epic, Helena (1924, aka Helen of Troy), is a great example of avant garde design, and features the bold use of a limited range of colours. It’s striking, grabs the attention, and offers lots of detail that draws the viewer’s attention (and a little unwillingly at that).

The image is the key factor in the poster’s design, with Vladimir Gajdarov’s Paris posing regally as if bathed in the rays of the setting sun, his handsome, aquiline features made all the more dramatic by his closed eyes and proud bearing. He’s like a god, his striking countenance offering no doubt that here is the movie’s hero in all his costumed splendour. His tanned, sun-blessed skin tones and wavy brown hair complement each other perfectly, and they blend seamlessly into the burnt orange flare of his tunic, and then on down into his right arm. Only the silver-grey of his breastplate breaks up the effect, but its presence there works, the juxtaposition of the deep reds and the shiny silver-grey proving arresting.

As we pan across the bottom half of the poster, there’s Paris’s helmet, an almost isolated pocket of silver-grey that features strange whorls and curlicues. It’s as if there should be a pattern there, something to occupy the eye as it lingers on the helmet, but the effect isn’t that considered or organised. Each swirl is independent of the others, and each has its own flow and purpose (even if, ultimately, we don’t know what that purpose is). Paris holds his helmet in place with rigid formality, an extension of his pose to the left.

But what’s this? There’s something odd going on in the poster’s centre. There’s something keeping Paris and Helen of Troy apart. At one end, by Paris’s left hand, it looks like it could be a fur, but it’s clearly attached to some kind of material that at its other end is too sharply defined to be from an animal (it also looks as if Paris would impale himself on it if he leans forward too far). This part of the image doesn’t make any sense, even if you accept that it’s the cockade to Paris’s helmet, and especially with the way that Edy Darclea’s Helen is leaning over it in her efforts to be closer to Paris. She looks both uncomfortable and awkward in her positioning. Her gaze, such as it is with her eyes being closed, isn’t even in line with that of Paris’ gaze, and her smile seems both unlikely and inappropriate.

Helen is further let down by the artist’s choice of hat wear. With its truncated top and red circles it’s the Ancient Greek equivalent of a bobble hat, but without the telltale bobble to give it all away. Her skin tone is problematical as well, with its light orange appearance looking too pale against the reds and greys near to her. And what we can see of her tunic reveals a distinct “peasant blouse” effect, an unlikely choice given the period. All this – and let’s forget about the lone ringlet allowed to drape itself over her shoulder – serves to make Helen a less effective component of the overall image than her lover, Paris. Deliberate? We’ll never know, but it’s strange that one side grabs the attention for all the right reasons, and the other side does the same but for all the wrong reasons.

Of course, this being a Russian poster, the text is in Cyrillic, with the main title given prominence near to the top right hand corner. Down in the right hand corner we have the movie’s two sub-titles: Part 1 – The Elopement of Helen, and Part 2 – The Fall of Troy, while crammed into the space below Paris’s right hand is what appears to be details of a limited engagement at one of Moscow’s cinemas. But if you have to spare a thought for anyone connected with this production, then it’s the principal cast of Darclea, Gajdarov, and Albert Steinrück that come off worst: they’re the names squashed between the back of Paris’s head and the edge of the poster. However, the text does make for a nice counterpoint to the main image, and even if it’s been added wherever there’s a space, it’s still effective in terms of the overall image.

This type of avant garde poster was a common sight in Russia during the 1920’s and while there are issues with the depiction of Helen, this is still a poster that draws you in and rewards on several levels. The colours are a pleasing mix of saturated and restrained, and despite Paris’s rigid bearing, contains enough “fun” elements to make it an enjoyable poster to look at, and much, much better than this French version (apologies for the grainy resolution):

Southside With You (2016)

12 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Barack Obama, Do the Right Thing, Drama, Ernie Barnes, First date, Michelle Robinson, Parker Sawyers, Review, Richard Tanne, Romance, Tika Sumpter, True story

D: Richard Tanne / 84m

Cast: Tika Sumpter, Parker Sawyers, Vanessa Bell Calloway, Phillip Edward Van Lear, Tom McElroy, Stephanie Monday

It’s 1989, and Michelle Robinson (Sumpter), a young lawyer with a firm in Chicago, is preparing to spend the afternoon with an associate who she’s mentoring. The young associate’s name is Barack Obama (Sawyers), and while Michelle’s parents (Calloway, Van Lear) tease her about it, she insists she’s not going on a date. When Barack arrives to pick her up, he’s late, there’s a hole in the passenger footwell of his car, and it’s clear that he smokes (which Michelle isn’t too keen on). And she learns that the community meeting he’s invited her to attend with him, isn’t until much later. Taking a further stand with Barack, she tells him they’re not on a date. He agrees (reluctantly), but adds that it won’t be a date until Michelle says so.

With time to kill, the pair attend an exhibition at a local arts centre. As they look at and voice their feelings about the artwork on display – by the artist Ernie Barnes – slowly but surely they begin to learn about each other. Michelle warms to Barack (though not too quickly), while he is obviously attracted to her. They talk about their backgrounds, make snap judgments about each other, and generally discover they have a liking for each other that Michelle, at least, is surprised by. From the arts centre, they go for a walk in the park, talk some more about their families, and in particular, Barack’s relationship with his mother and father.

At the community meeting, Michelle witnesses Barack take on the role of confident, impassioned orator, as he takes up an issue that’s causing the community to feel disparaged. He encourages them to look at things from a different perspective. Afterwards, Michelle tells Barack how impressed she was – even if it did seem like a set up, what with her being there. Barack admits he may have hoped for such an outcome, but instead of taking him to task – as she would have done earlier in the day – Michelle appears to be okay with his minor subterfuge.

The two have dinner, and learn more about each other’s religious leanings, before attending a screening of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. As they leave, Michelle is temporarily by herself, and she meets one of the partners at her law firm, Avery Goodman (McElroy), and his wife (Monday). When he asks her why one of the characters in the movie acted in the way that he did, she’s lost for an answer. When Barack reappears, he has an answer for Avery’s question. Avery is impressed, and suggests to Michelle that she ensure Barack’s time at the firm is beneficial. When they’re by themselves again, Michelle rounds on Barack and tells him why this should never have been a date: because of how it would look at the firm. Chastened, Barack takes Michelle home, but not before he makes one last stop…

It’s such an obvious conceit – show the first date between two famous people (and before they were famous) – that it’s somewhat surprising that it hasn’t been done before. A project begun by writer/director Richard Tanne back in 2007, Southside With You is a warm, big-hearted piece of romantic conjecture: what would that first date between Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson have been like? Would they have hit it off straight away, or would they have discovered a common enmity, a hurdle too big to overcome at the first attempt? The latter seems to be the case early on, what with Michelle’s refusing to classify their going out together as a “date”, while Barack’s oh-so-puppy-dog approach doesn’t appear to be gaining any traction either.

One of the things that makes this imagining of real life events so charming is its refusal to litter the script with presentiments of the future, those moments when (usually) dialogue hints at greater things to come. Even the one time that Michelle suggests Barack try his hand at politics, it’s all said and done with in a matter of seconds. The movie remains firmly in the here and now of 1989, never deviating from its carefully constructed sense of time and place, and keeping its two main characters anchored to their lives as they were then. This leads to a raft of information about the movie’s prospective lovebirds that most people won’t be aware of, such as Barack’s father dying at the relatively young age of forty-six, or that Michelle was living at home to help with her father, who has MS.

Their verbal sparring, an often witty joust between two fiercely intelligent people certain (for the most part) about their place in the world, informs most of the movie’s running time, and makes for some spirited exchanges between the two. It’s here that the performances sparkle and come into their own, with Sumpter’s slightly waspish turn as Michelle slowly softening as the movie progresses. As she lowers her guard thanks to Barack’s easy-going presence, Michelle becomes more relaxed – and more likeable. It’s an impressive performance, subtly shaded for the most part, and hopefully will allow Sumpter the opportunity to take on more high profile roles in the future. But good as she is, it’s Sawyers’ performance as Barack “O-what-a” that holds the attention. Looking a good deal like the real Barack Obama, and sounding exactly like him, inflections and all, Sawyers inhabits the role with ease, avoiding any possible accusations of mimicry and providing viewers with a fully-rounded portrayal of a young man hoping to convince his “date” that that’s exactly what she is.

Tanne takes full advantage of his lead actors’ skill in their roles, and lets them do all the “hard” work, while he orchestrates things with deceptive ease. The time he’s spent writing and refining Southside With You has clearly paid off, and the simplicity of it all adds immeasurably to the movie’s charm and appeal. With a warmth to its cinematography – courtesy of Patrick Scola – and a winsome, winning score by Stephen James Taylor, the movie is a pleasure to watch from start to finish. The only question that remains is what Barack and Michelle think of the movie. They do have a copy…

Rating: 9/10 – with two standout performances from Sumpter and Sawyers, and a precision-tooled script, Southside With You entrances and beguiles in equal measure; a romantic drama with heart and soul, as well as humour, it’s the kind of low budget indie movie that wins heaps of praise, but is seen by very few – and in this case, that’s a crime, pure and simple.

The Birth of a Nation (2016)

11 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

1831, Armie Hammer, Drama, Historical drama, Jackie Earle Haley, Nat Turner, Nate Parker, Penelope Ann Miller, Rebellion, Review, Slavery, Southampton County, True story

D: Nate Parker / 120m

Cast: Nate Parker, Armie Hammer, Penelope Ann Miller, Jackie Earle Haley, Mark Boone Jr, Colman Domingo, Aunjanue Ellis, Dwight Henry, Aja Naomi King, Esther Scott, Roger Guenveur Smith, Gabrielle Union

The Birth of a Nation reaches our screens trailing controversy and dismay by being an historical movie focusing on certain direct issues, but having to deal with other indirect issues as well (but more of these later). A retelling of the Southampton County, Virginia rebellion led by Nat Turner in 1831, in which a slave uprising started by Turner led to the deaths of around sixty-five white people – men, women and children – and over two hundred and fifty black people. Turner managed to recruit around seventy slaves and free men to his cause, but the rebellion was quashed after a couple of days. Turner avoided capture for over two months before he was discovered hiding in a field. He was convicted at trial and sentenced to be hanged.

Those are the bare bones of a tale that director/writer/actor Nate Parker has chosen to make into The Birth of a Nation. For anyone unaware of the Southampton County rebellion, this movie will likely prove illuminating on a basic level, but Parker has chosen to make his own version of the rebellion, ignoring certain facts and events in order to make a more dramatic movie (as if a rebellion wasn’t dramatic enough). So, this isn’t an historically accurate movie, it’s an interpretation of the events that took place in Southampton County up to and including the rebellion. It’s important to make this point, “up front” as it were, because in doing so, Parker has actually managed to make a movie that lacks the impact the rebellion must have had at the time.

We see Nat first as a child. He’s taken by his mother (Ellis) to a tribe of blacks living in the woods. They tell him that the birthmark he has means he’s destined to be a prophet. This sets the tone of the movie: that Nat will grow up into an adult whose destiny is to change… well, actually, we never know, because Parker never gets around to telling us. Of course, he’ll eventually fight for freedom and seek to overturn injustice, but as a young child he’s encouraged to read by his owner’s mother (Miller), and is treated with all appropriate fairness for the time and the place he’s a part of. Young Nat takes to the Bible, and from there we see him grow into a young man who is a credit to both himself and the family who remain his owners, and who are now embodied by his childhood friend, Samuel Turner (Hammer).

So for the best part of an hour, Nat is well respected and regarded by Samuel and everyone around him, and life is good, despite the obvious limitations such as needing a written pass to travel outside the grounds of the Turner estate, and being struck repeatedly for offering a kindness to a white woman. He gains a reputation as a preacher, persuades Samuel to purchase a young woman, Cherry (King), who later becomes his wife, and manages to avoid raising the ire of local slave catcher, Cobb (Haley). But although Nat is well aware of the position that he and his fellow slaves are in, and the various ways that things can go wrong for them all, he lacks any will to do anything about it.

It’s only when Nat is hired out as a preacher, and begins to see just how bad things are at other plantations, that he begins to rethink things. One particular incident, followed by the brutal assault of his wife by Cobb and his men, leads Nat to anger, and a desire for revenge against “the white man”. He gathers a number of other slaves, and they begin their rebellion by attacking Samuel and his household before heading to other parts of the county, killing indiscriminately as they go. It’s not long before they come face to face with Cobb and his men, and a fight to the death ensues. Nat manages to escape and goes into hiding.

All this is pretty standard fare, with Parker portraying Turner as a man who turns his back on the society that’s treated him well enough until he begins to question that society more closely. Which actually makes the small matter of motivation a bit of a problem, because Parker the screenwriter doesn’t give Parker the actor anything to work with, other than a handful of Bible passages that he gets to deliver in an angry fashion, or, when he’s confronted by Cobb, as a defiant call to arms. Parker struggles in all departments to show us the anger and the passion behind Nat’s decision to rebel, or why he would descend so quickly and easily into violence. Yes, there’s the appalling treatment of slaves, yes, there’s the institutionalised racism of the times, and yes, there’s the personal injuries done to him and Cherry, but in Parker’s hands none of this adds up to Nat being the instigator of a rebellion. The change comes about too quickly, and as with many movies, this change appears to come about solely because the movie needs to move on.

Against other movies such as 12 Years a Slave (2013) or A House Divided: Denmark Vesey’s Rebellion (1982), The Birth of a Nation – a title that doesn’t mean anything in the context of what happens in the movie itself – is too restrained in its approach to be entirely effective. Aside from one very disturbing scene involving a slave being force fed, Parker keeps everything on an even dramatic keel, with plot and story developments coming along when required, and all played out in a way that keeps the viewer at a distance. The look and feel of the movie owes a lot to the style and structure of Roots (1977), but without that series’ attention to character, or its narrative drive. Here, by the time Nat gets around to starting his rebellion, the average viewer will be glad to have gotten through all the sub-par dramatics that have gone before, and will be looking forward to the movie gaining some forward momentum.

Performance-wise, it’s Parker’s movie, with the likes of Hammer (subdued surliness), Boone Jr (straggle-haired insouciance), Miller (pained resignation), Haley (gnarly aggression), and King (unfaltering sweetness) reduced to minor roles, and having the barest amount of depth or characterisation to work with. But it’s also Parker’s movie in terms of direction, and here he’s found wanting. And like so many other directors working from their own scripts, he’s not able to find solutions to the problems that one provides for the other. There are jarring moments where continuity is derailed (one involving Samuel will have audiences shaking their heads in confusion), moments where the pace of the movie slows to a crawl, and moments where Parker’s inexperience as a director leaves the movie avoiding any complexity in the story he’s telling.

In the right hands, Nat Turner’s story could have been a powerful, impassioned examination of an event that had far-reaching effects on how slavery was regulated, and which could be said to have made things far worse for the slaves of the antebellum South. But for now we’ll have to make do with Nate Parker’s version of events, which strives to make a hero out of an ordinary man who advocated wholesale bloodshed as the drive for his rebellion, and who was found hiding in a hole covered by fence rails rather than nobly giving himself up as Parker shows here. And Parker, whose past has distracted too many people from focusing in the right direction, has made a movie that ultimately lacks cohesion, and in doing so, has possibly done a greater disservice to Turner’s legacy than anyone since those tumultuous days in Southampton County, Virginia.

Rating: 4/10 – a broad, uninspired approach to an important moment in black history, The Birth of a Nation lacks finesse, complexity, and energy; Parker’s attempts at multi-tasking do the movie no favours, and there’s a stale air of tiredness about the whole thing that transmits itself to the viewer, all of which makes the movie a bit of a chore to sit through.

Morgan (2016)

10 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Anya Taylor-Joy, Boyd Holbrook, Drama, Experiment, Kate Mara, L9, Luke Scott, Michelle Yeoh, Paul Giamatti, Review, Sci-fi, Thriller, Toby Jones

D: Luke Scott / 92m

Cast: Kate Mara, Anya Taylor-Joy, Rose Leslie, Toby Jones, Michelle Yeoh, Boyd Holbrook, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Paul Giamatti, Michael Yare, Chris Sullivan, Vinette Robinson, Brian Cox

As the song has it, “If you go down to the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise…” Not once you see Kate Mara’s risk assessment consultant, Lee Weathers, driving to a facility hidden deep in the woods where a science experiment, codenamed L9, is going badly wrong. The experiment in question is the creation of a human/nano technology hybrid. The hybrid (Taylor-Joy) looks like a young woman, is called Morgan, is actually five years old, and has recently stabbed one of the team, Kathy (Leigh), repeatedly in the face and blinded them in their left eye. With a psych evaluation planned to take place that will determine whether or not the project continues, Lee’s role is to make the final decision, either to continue the work or to shut it down.

For everyone’s safety, Morgan is confined to a room that has toughened glass from wall to wall, and floor to ceiling. She appears to understand the need for this, but the team are overly apologetic about the incident with Kathy. They all state that it was their fault and not Morgan’s; they should have known better, should have been paying better attention to her current mental state. Lee takes none of this for granted, but does accept that they treat Morgan more as a human being than as a thing. When the psychiatrist, Dr Alan Shapiro (Giamatti), arrives the next day to conduct his assessment, his approach goads Morgan to anger, and a violent outburst means that Lee has no option but to shut down the project.

She’s stopped, though, by the team. Rendered unconscious, she awakes in Morgan’s safe room, while the team’s own efforts to control the situation – and Morgan – start to unravel at an alarming rate. By the time Lee finds a way out of the room, Morgan’s determination to be free from the confines of the facility has proven disastrous for the team, and she makes her escape, taking along Amy (Leslie), who is the one member of the team that Morgan considers is her friend. But Lee is equally determined to find Morgan and make sure that the project is shut down once and for all.

Morgan is director Luke Scott’s first feature, a step up in terms of money and opportunity following his clever and impressive short movie, Loom (2012). That movie augured well for the future, but with Morgan it seems that Ridley Scott’s son has been let down by a poorly realised script, and the faint whiff of post-production interference. There’s little about the movie that works as well as it should, and long-time fans of this type of speculative sci-fi will be dismayed by the many ways in which the narrative shies away from making any kind of moral statement.

Another screenplay picked out from the Black List (this time 2014’s), Morgan begins with a shocking act of violence, and continues with not one character reacting or behaving normally in its wake. Everyone carries on as if it was a minor incident, one that’s hardly worth bothering about. Morgan behaving strangely is to be expected, but when the team behave even more strangely than she does, and right from the start, then it only serves to undermine the drama that follows. Only Michelle Yeoh’s mother figure acts as if she has any idea of the consequences to Morgan’s actions, but she’s allotted so little screen time that she becomes the occasional, and token, voice of reason, trotted out to offer a limited balance to everyone else’s strange behaviour.

Things are further hampered by the character of Lee, played with stony-faced antipathy by Mara. It’s a role that’s difficult to talk about without revealing too much of why the character is at the facility in the first place, but while she’s an outsider given over to remaining so, Mara provides a better performance than expected, giving Lee an unexpected likeability even though she’s pretty much there to conduct a corporate hatchet job if necessary. As the movie progresses, her minimal social skills are stripped away, and Mara again strikes a careful balance between “assassin for hire” and consultant doing her job. She’s matched by Taylor-Joy, whose bleached looks and unnerving stare never quite manage to morph into the features of someone you could trust implicitly. Though her motivation becomes more and more strained as the movie continues, her performance highlights the emotions that Morgan has managed to express, even though she can’t understand them properly.

Alas, the rest of the cast aren’t given nearly enough to make their roles worthwhile, and as you might expect, some are just waiting around until Morgan decides that everyone is surplus to requirements. The final half hour ups the ante in terms of action, and Mara and Taylor-Joy enjoy some well-choreographed fight scenes, but even then there’s a distinct lack of tension or energy. Scott seems unable to inject the necessary spark to make things that much more exciting, and the movie suffers as a result. As it heads towards an inevitable conclusion, one that it’s set up right from the moment we first see Lee in her car, Morgan begins to look and sound and feel like another great idea for a movie given the least amount of commitment by all involved. That’s not entirely true, but there are large stretches where the viewer won’t be able to shake off that feeling at all.

Watching Morgan, there’s an obvious correlation with Ex Machina (2015), but this is a different movie with a different agenda, and nowhere near as complex. The script by Seth W. Owen isn’t as fully rounded or well thought out as it needs to be, and Scott never really finds a way to avoid the pitfalls that Owen has left in situ. And watching the movie unfold, and the speed with which it changes direction from a somewhat intriguing sci-fi thriller to all-out action drama, it does smack a little of interference in the post-production stages, as if the producers had realised that the movie was in danger of losing its audience altogether if it didn’t change tack. On the plus side, the movie does have a decent score courtesy of Max Richter, and Tom McCullagh’s production design does help to anchor the movie in a more realistic fashion than the script does.

Rating: 4/10 – what could have been an intriguing, thought-provoking movie is scuppered by poor narrative choices, a lack of credible characterisations, and a shift in tone two thirds in that alters the movie’s trajectory as if no one would notice; a good idea given a lacklustre presentation, Morgan will only satisfy those viewers who don’t expect much from sci-fi thrillers, or are comfortable looking at things only on a superficial level.

Bleed for This (2016)

09 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Aaron Eckhart, Ben Younger, Boxing, Car accident, Ciarán Hinds, Drama, Halo, Miles Teller, Review, Sport, True story, Vinny Pazienza

D: Ben Younger / 117m

Cast: Miles Teller, Aaron Eckhart, Katey Sagal, Ciarán Hinds, Ted Levine, Jordan Gelber, Amanda Clayton, Daniel Sauli, Peter Quillin, Jean Pierre Augustin, Edwin Rodriguez

True stories from the world of sport always aim for the inspirational, to show an individual or a team face up to and defeat the odds (which are often stacked against them). There’s room for self-doubt, absolutely there is, and there’s room for the odd setback or stumble along the way to – usually – championship glory, the miracle comeback, or both. Bleed for This, the true story of boxer Vinny Pazienza (Teller), is a movie that includes a miracle comeback and championship glory. As such it should be a powerful, gripping feelgood story that grabs the audience’s attention and sympathies from the start, and then puts them through the same emotional wringer that the main character(s) went through. Well, the key phrase is “it should be”. Bleed for This, however, looks and sounds as if it doesn’t know what an emotional wringer is, let alone be able to put an audience through it.

The problem here is that, prior to the car accident that saw Vinny Pazienza suffer a broken neck (which could have meant his not walking ever again, let alone boxing), and way before he decided he was going to ignore doctor’s orders and work out while still wearing the halo that allowed his neck to heal normally, the boxer’s life wasn’t one that warranted a movie being made about it. He’d had a relatively successful career early on as a lightweight, but fighting at junior welterweight he found himself on a title losing streak. He moved up to junior middleweight, and began winning again, culminating in winning WBA World Jr. Middleweight Championship against Gilbert Dele. But then came that fateful car accident, and four steel screws in his head.

Now, Pazienza’s life becomes interesting, now it becomes the kind of story that the movies would be interested in telling. And so, twenty-five years after that career-threatening injury, we have Bleed for This, the true(-ish) story of Vinny Pazienza’s recovery and return to the ring. It has all the hallmarks of a traditional tale of triumph over adversity, of how one man overcame tremendous physical trauma to continue doing the one thing that gives his life meaning. But as you watch the movie, as you see Vinny Pazienza’s story unfold, there’s one thing you’ll be asking yourself: namely, where’s the passion?

For, despite the drama and the incredible journey Pazienza took getting back into the ring, the movie version of that journey is about as exciting as watching the man train for two hours. Somewhere along the way, writer/director Ben Younger did something unforgivable: he forgot the passion. Sure there are times when Pazienza gets angry, but he’s also determined, sour, happy, uncertain, and resentful in equal measure. He experiences all the emotions you’d expect someone to experience in these circumstances, but the movie doesn’t allow any one of those emotions to have more screen time than the others, or to appear to have had any more effect on him. In essence, it’s all too neat.

Bleed for This is a movie that signposts a tremendous struggle ahead, as Pazienza begins working out in the basement of his parents’ home. Aided by his trainer, Kevin Rooney (Eckhart), Pazienza lifts weights, regains definition (and the small degree of self-respect the script allowed him to lose after the accident), and shocks everybody with his progress. At least, he would shock everybody, but Younger approaches this section of the movie as if it were nothing more than a necessary bridge between the Dele fight and the eventual showdown with Roberto Duran (which wasn’t his first fight after the accident, that was with Luis Santana). There’s roughly a year between the accident and the comeback fight, but you wouldn’t know it thanks to Younger. It feels like a much shorter period because Younger’s impatient to get Pazienza back in the ring, to get to that miracle moment he believes the audience is waiting for. He also can’t resist throwing in a bit of family drama, with Pazienza’s father (Hinds) suddenly revealing a sense of guilt for pushing his son too hard earlier in his career.

There are other times where the basic story gets padded out with superfluous moments that add little or nothing to the main narrative. It’s established from the very first shot of Rooney that he’s an alcoholic. But it keeps cropping up, and never goes anywhere; even when he’s arrested for attempted drunk driving, there’s no fallout or consequence to it. Where some movies would use this as an excuse to remove him from the corner for the big fight, thereby adding extra pressure on the fighter etc. etc., here it’s just padding, and flimsy, unnecessary padding at that. And then there’s the background machinations of fight promoters the Duva’s (Levine, Gelber), who are regularly accused of putting their interests ahead of Pazienza’s, as if the notion that they’re self-serving fight promoters has come completely out of left field (apologies for the mixed sports metaphor).

But if that wasn’t enough, if the pedestrian plotting, and the stale characters, and the excessive padding, just weren’t enough to make the movie difficult enough to enjoy already, Younger executes the coup de grace by fumbling the fights themselves. A mess of choppy editing, awkward camera angles, tight close ups, and fragmented jabs and blows, the fights do all they can to hide the fact that Teller can’t box. Maybe he didn’t have enough prep time to look convincing, maybe he was hired for his acting ability and not his ability to throw a punch – either way, Teller isn’t going to be heralded for showing off his “skills” in the squared circle.

As for the performances, Teller is hampered by the restraint Younger shows in his script, and several of the more dramatic moments in the movie show Teller in a good light, but it’s in the sense that he’s realised he’s only going to get so many opportunities to really shine. Eckhart is stuck with the worst receding hairline since Richard Attenborough in 10 Rillington Place (1971), while Sagal and Hinds do their best with characters who are two steps removed from being Italian-American parental stereotypes.

There is a decent, emotionally gripping drama to be made from Vinny Pazienza’s comeback against the odds, but Bleed for This really isn’t it. It’s professionally made, and technically at least, doesn’t fault, but the way in which the story has been told is less than successful. Younger neutralises the drama that occurs outside the ring, and in doing so, fails to recognise that in this case, that’s where the drama ultimately lies. And by doing that he lets down his talented cast, the audience, and the man who went through all of it – and who now gets to see a movie about him that can’t focus on him properly, or present effectively the struggle he went through to be worthy of a movie about his life.

Rating: 5/10 – with Bleed for This lacking a cohesive screenplay and a real sense of its main character’s determination not to give up (which scares him because it’s too easy), this is one biopic that lets everyone down; it also lacks flair, and a sense of urgency, and only impresses thanks to Larkin Seiple’s gloomy, shadow-filled cinematography (a surprisingly good fit for the material), and a robust sound mix that at least makes the fight sequences feel more aggressive than we can actually make out.

Top 10 Animated Movies at the International Box Office

08 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Animation, Disney, Dreamworks, Illumination Entertainment, International Box Office, Movies, Pixar

Animation can often provide a better, more enjoyable, and more memorable viewing experience than the majority – in fact, the vast majority – of live action movies. You could always count on Disney, and though they went through a creative rough patch during the Seventies and early Eighties, they bounced back and are now as strong a creative force as they’ve ever been (and perhaps more so). But in the last fifteen to twenty years the House of Mouse hasn’t had things all its own way. The arrival of animation studios from the likes of Dreamworks and Sony, as well as the emergence of Pixar, has brought animation into a new Golden Age, and so much so that animated movies are now some of the most consistently high-earning movies released each year. It shouldn’t be a surprise that two of this year’s animated releases have made over $1 billion at the international box office, or that the Top 5 in this list have all crossed that mark. So, here they are: the Top 10 animated movies at the international box office.

10 – Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009) – $886,686,817

The third entry in the Ice Age series is also the one where the rot began to set in, but like the previous chapters before it, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs was the animated box office champ for its year, and proof that its creators, Blue Sky Studios, knew they had a franchise that would keep on paying dividends. On its own, the movie is an uneven, less humorous entry than its predecessors, but it does feature a great vocal performance from Simon Pegg, and some suitably over-the-top visuals, making it a treat for younger viewers but not so much for anyone over the age of, say, fifteen.

9 – Shrek 2 (2004) – $919,838,758

It may be hard to believe now but Shrek (2001) wasn’t quite as good as most people’s memories will tell them. It was certainly a novel approach by Dreamworks, but what worked most was the inspired voice casting, and a level of disrespect for fairy tales that raised most of the laughs. But Shrek 2 is the series’ pinnacle, a movie that embraces all those old fairy tale tropes and extracts the humour from them rather than by trampling on them first. It also has a decent story, the welcome addition of Antonio Banderas as Puss in Boots, and a sleeker, bolder visual style than its predecessor. Plus it deserves credit for keeping Eddie Murphy in the list of the Top 10 Actors at the Box Office.

8 – Finding Nemo (2003) – $940,335,536

One of Pixar’s most enduring and well-loved movies, Finding Nemo is an almost perfect blend of storytelling, visual design, voice acting, and direction. Only the rhythm and the pace of the movie’s middle section lets it down, but this is still head and shoulders above most of the movies on this list, and is a reminder that when Pixar get it right there’s no touching them. In its day a box office juggernaut, the movie has earned its place in cinema history and continues to delight successive generations of movie goers, a testament to its ingenuity and charm.

7 – The Lion King (1994) – $968,483,777

Although The Little Mermaid (1989) was the movie that showed Disney had turned the corner on the creative funk that had dogged them through the Seventies and early Eighties, it was The Lion King that really showed they were back on track. A perfect blend of traditional hand-drawn 2D animation with fleeting uses of rotoscoping, allied to one of the best musical soundtracks Disney have ever produced, and a story that was by turns, humorous, gripping, tragic, life-affirming, and satisfying, The Lion King is still the animated Disney movie that all the company’s successors have to live up to.

6 – Despicable Me 2 (2013) – $970,761,885

Buoyed by the success of the first Despicable Me (2010), Illumination Entertainment probably knew they had a surefire winner when they began making this sequel, and so it proved. Landing just shy of the $1 billion mark, it’s not the best of sequels – indeed, its storyline is possibly the weakest of all the movies on the list – but it does have those little yellow cash generators, the Minions, and an infectious visual style that you can’t help but smile at, even while you’re groaning at the jokes. With a third movie to come in 2017, the continuing success of the franchise seems assured, which can’t be a bad thing now that Disney has consumed Pixar.

5 – Zootopia (2016) – $1,023,761,003

This year’s surprise hit from Disney is possibly the House of Mouse’s finest hour, a whip-smart anthropomorphic comedy that has a strong storyline, subplots that enhance the main narrative, two wonderful performances from Ginnifer Goodwin and Jason Bateman, winning characters, and of course, Flash the sloth. A joy from start to finish, we can only hope that Disney doesn’t make any sequels, and that they allow this to stand alone as one of the best animated features of this or any year.

4 – Finding Dory (2016) – $1,027,190,583

Not as good as Finding Nemo, but more successful (go figure), Finding Dory benefitted from a built-in audience who have been waiting for a sequel ever since the first movie was released, and because it didn’t stray too far from the set up of the original. Pixar needed this to be a hit, and they got their wish, but with Cars 3 up next – not the most auspicious of sequels they could have decided to release – it may be a while before the company that revolutionised computer animated movies adds another of its features to the list.

3 – Toy Story 3 (2010) – $1,066,969,703

The ne plus ultra of animated movies – sorry, numbers one and two – Toy Story 3 is quite frankly, the best second sequel ever made. A bold gamble by Pixar to make a movie about the relinquishing of childhood, and to make the ending both sad and life-affirming at the same time, this shows Pixar in complete control of every aspect of the production and seemingly with ease, showing everybody else how it should be done. A perfect way to end a trilogy, and even though Toy Story 4 will be with us in 2019 (and which will answer the question, what happened to Bo Peep?), it’s got a long way to go before it’s as good as this entry in the series.

2 – Minions (2015) – $1,159,398,397

Minions‘ place at the number two spot just goes to show what can happen when a minor character (or in this case, characters) proves more entertaining than the main character. Gru was fun, but the Minions were endlessly funny and endlessly adorable. A spin-off movie of their own was always likely, and Illumination Entertainment came up with a great idea for their solo outing, a kind of potted history of the little yellow devils search for a villainous boss down the ages. It’s still not their best outing – that would be Despicable Me (2010) – but with no immediate plans for a sequel, there’s a good possibility that their position so close to the top won’t remain that way for very long.

1 – Frozen (2013) – $1,276,480,335

These days, Disney can do no wrong. In recent years they’ve released mega-successes at the box office, won Academy Awards, and thanks largely to the stewardship of John Lasseter, made successful animated movie after successful animated movie. Frozen is the studio’s most successful venture, a mighty crowd-pleaser that mixes great songs and inspired comedy, even if Sitron the horse is a dead ringer for Maximus from Tangled (2010). Inevitably, a sequel is in the works, but whether or not it will have the same emotional heft that Frozen has remains to be seen. And whether or not it has the ability to outdo its predecessor, well, only time and a billion pre-teen girls will decide.

Mini-Review: Blind Woman’s Curse (1970)

07 Wednesday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Action, Drama, Hoki Tokuda, Japan, Kaidan nobori ryû, Meiko Kaji, Revenge, Review, Teruo Ishii, Yakuza

Original title: Hîchirimen bâkuto – nôbarydu takahadâ

aka Black Cat’s Revenge; Strange Tales of Dragon Tattoo; The Tattooed Swordswoman

D: Teruo Ishii / 85m

Cast: Meiko Kaji, Hoki Tokuda, Makoto Satô, Hideo Sunazuka, Shirô Ôtsuji, Tôru Abe, Yoshi Katô, Yôko Takagi, Tatsumi Hijikata

Akemi (Kaji) is the head of the notorious Tachibana gang. During an attack on a rival gang, she kills the gang’s leader and inadvertently injures his sister. A spell in prison sees Akemi bond with five of her fellow inmates and they all have part of a larger dragon tattoo inked onto their backs. Three years later, and Akemi is head of the Tachibana clan again but she has determined to go straight. This doesn’t sit well with some of her followers, particularly Tatsu (Ôtsuji), who plots with a rival yakuza gang leader, Dobashi (Abe), to have her overthrown. Tatsu ensures that two of the Tachibana clan are killed by Dobashi’s men so as to incite war between the two gangs, but Akemi is forebearing and doesn’t rise to the bait.

Shortly after, Dobashi is approached by a blind woman, Aiko (Tokuda), who offers him her services as a swordswoman. Impressed by her skill with a blade, Dobashi accepts. But before he can devise the next stage of his plot against Akemi, one of her friends from prison is found murdered, and with her tattoo removed from her back. A note attached to the body promises further violence and makes it clear that Akemi is the ultimate target. Matters between the two gangs escalate, including the murder of Akemi’s uncle (Katô) and the kidnapping of his daughter, Chie (Takagi). With the aid of a wandering fighter-for-hire called Tani (Satô), Akemi eventually decides to face Dobashi head on, but finds herself facing the blind woman instead.

Blind Woman’s Curse is a weird concoction, combining as it does a vengeful blind woman, warring yakuza gangs, an eye-rolling, wild-haired hunchback, an opium den full of topless female addicts, gory violence, references to William Tell, a curse involving a black cat, an underwater torture sequence, a hint of the supernatural, and a third gang leader who wears a bowler hat and a loose, buttock-revealing red loincloth. There’s rarely a dull moment, or a shot that doesn’t make the viewer sit up and take notice, but even with all this going on, there’s a nagging feeling that all these elements don’t quite add up to a satisfying whole. As the movie progresses, the various plot strands sometimes tie themselves up in so many knots that they need the aid of a samurai blade to solve things. By the time Tani and Chie escape the underwater torture devised for them by Dobashi, and do so miraculously and without explanation, it’s clear that the movie – scripted by director Ishii with Chûsei Sone – is in a hurry to reach a conclusion, and if the movie’s internal logic needs to be sacrificed, then so be it.

And yet, the bizarre combination of elements does work for the most part, and the movie does have its fair share of entertaining set-pieces – the opening slow-motion, rain-soaked battle between Akemi’s men and a rival gang is a good example. It’s all shot with a mix of painterly formality and tense immediacy by Shigeru Kitaizumi, and for once, the editing (by Osamu Inoue) doesn’t hamper the flow and rhythm of the movie in the way that a lot of similar Japanese movies of this ilk are affected. Ishii, better known for the ten-movie Abashiri Prison series, brings out the usual themes of honour and regret, and makes Akemi a more solemn character than might be expected. He also keeps any humour to a minimum, choosing instead to focus on the theme of revenge. It all adds up to a better-than-average outing within the genre, and well worth seeking out.

Rating: 7/10 – Ishii’s take on yakuza versus yakuza is an intense, often thrilling example of Japanese movie making gone berserk; Blind Woman’s Curse throws in everything but the kitchen sink, and in the process proves largely rewarding, even if it does go off at a tangent too many times for its own good.

Poster of the Week – Giant from the Unknown (1958)

06 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Horror, Movie poster, Poster of the week, Richard E. Cunha, Screencraft Enterprises Inc

Giant from the Unknown (1958)

At first glance, the poster for Giant from the Unknown seems like a random collection of typographical styles, two primary colours and one secondary colour, a damsel in distress, and a lightning effect that appears to have been included for no particular reason at all. And that’s without the titular giant’s werewolf-like appearance (“My, what a lot of chest hair you have.” “All the better to frighten you, my dear… hopefully”). But it’s a poster that is deceptively effective – or effectively deceptive? – and which uses the apparently random nature of its elements to provide a strangely compelling overall image.

The movie itself is about – and I quote – “A very large, degenerate, Spanish conqueror [who] is freed from suspended animation by lightning and goes on a killing spree in a small town.” So that explains the lightning bolt. Then there’s the depiction of the Giant (who we now know is from Spain and not the Unknown – wherever that is). The artist has come up with an image that, ultimately, is misleading, but with its unruly hair and wild-eyed stare, and allied to a hairy, sharp-nailed hand, is much more of a beast than a giant. Fortunately he’s also proportionately bigger than the woman he’s menacing (though you do have to wonder what his little finger is doing). He’s a commanding figure when all’s said and done, and his stare seems to be directed right at you, which is unnerving considering he’s just an image on a poster.

The woman he’s towering over should be more eye-catching, what with her flimsy red dress, splash of hair, petrified gaze, and exposed flesh. The artist has seen fit to remove the strap from over the woman’s right shoulder, an excision that is at once exploitative and also a way to further highlight her vulnerability. The Giant doesn’t exactly look lascivious, but the inference is clear: that flimsy red dress won’t be there for long once he catches her. Of course, this is from 1958, and there was absolutely no chance of the poster image being replicated within the movie, but certain target audiences of the time would have hoped like crazy that it was.

The largely green background aids the two central images to stand out more, and gives the title a chance to “pop”, it’s sharp-edges and crowded conjoined lettering serving to accentuate the strangeness of the movie. (It’s also interesting to speculate that the woman is reaching desperately to grab the word “the” and maybe save herself.) Above the title is the movie’s tagline, a typical piece of hyperbole that even moviegoers of the time wouldn’t have been fooled by. The typeface used is unexpectedly dull, and doesn’t fit the random nature of the other elements – unless that’s the point of it, and a touch of random dullness was somehow a requirement.

The remaining type details the main cast members, and is in a more traditional black. But there’s an obvious – glaringly obvious – omission: the name of the director (in this case Richard E. Cunha, who was also the movie’s DoP). Either this was a tremendous oversight, or a deliberate decision by Screencraft Enterprises, Inc.; either way, not seeing a director’s name on a poster doesn’t exactly add confidence in the finished product’s likelihood of being good/entertaining/worth seeing, even if it is called Giant from the Mountain.

But all in all, this is a poster that, while largely generic for the time it was produced, exerts a strange fascination, and has an odd hypnotic nature to it. It’s a diamond in the rough, a poster that’s truly from the Unknown, and a better advert for the movie than it perhaps deserves. It’s certainly better than this Mexican lobby card that was used (note the difference between the artist’s impression and the actual Giant):

Agree? Disagree? Feel free to let me know.

Hell or High Water (2016)

05 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Bank robbers, Ben Foster, Brothers, Chris Pine, David Mackenzie, Drama, Jeff Bridges, Review, Texas, Thriller, Western

D: David Mackenzie / 102m

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gil Birmingham, Marin Ireland, John-Paul Howard, Kristin Berg, Katy Mixon, Dale Dickey, Kevin Rankin

Toby and Tanner Howard (Pine, Foster) are brothers who carry out bank robberies. They target branches of the Texas Midlands Bank, hitting two of them in the same morning. They are working to a plan of Toby’s devising, and they cover their tracks to the extent of burying the cars they use in the robberies, and taking the money across the state line into Oklahoma and laundering it at an Indian casino. Once the money has been laundered, they then get the casino to issue their “winnings” in the form of a cheque… which is made out to Texas Midlands Bank. Why? Because thanks to a reverse mortgage provided by the bank to the brothers’ recently deceased mother, their ranch will suffer foreclosure if the outstanding mortgage isn’t paid. And that’s without the oil that’s been found on their ranch as well…

The police investigation is headed up by Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton (Bridges) and his long-suffering partner, Alberto Parker (Birmingham). Hamilton is near to retirement, and his experience tells him that the bank robbers have a specific sum they’re aiming for; once they’ve got it they’ll stop – even though Tanner carries out an impromptu robbery on another bank. Realising that they’ve got a beef with Texas Midlands Bank, Hamilton persuades Parker to stake out one of the bank’s other branches, and they wait for the robbers to show up. With only one more robbery needed to net them the rest of the money they need, Toby and Tanner arrive at another branch altogether, only to find it’s been closed down. They decide to rob another branch in a bigger town, which also means a bigger risk.

The robbery is not a complete success. The brothers get the money they need but find themselves pursued by gun-toting locals. They manage to split up, and soon Tanner finds himself followed by the police. As he heads into the nearby hills in an attempt to escape, Toby takes the money and tries to get across the border and return to the Indian casino. But first there’s the small matter of a police checkpoint…

A modern day Western set in West Texas (but shot mostly in Eastern New Mexico), Hell or High Water‘s sombre screenplay used to be known as Comancheria. Neither title really does justice to a story that revolves around money and the way in which its importance is felt keenly by those who don’t have it, or how casually it’s regarded by those that do have it. This part of West Texas is peppered with roadside signs offering both financial and religious solutions for dealing with personal debt, but none of these signs have been put there by the banks or the loan companies that are deemed responsible for so much of the debt and deprivation that the average West Texan endures as part of their daily life.

But Toby Howard isn’t going to accept the loss of his family’s ranch (or the oil found below it). He’s not going to become another victim of the financial institutions that plague the area with their fire-sale mentality and lack of humanity. Along with his brother, Tanner, he’s going to fight back, he’s going to make Texas Midlands Bank accountable to him. It’s a classic David vs Goliath tale, except that in this case, Goliath doesn’t even know he’s in a fight. Taylor Sheridan’s perceptive, yet harsh screenplay makes it clear who the villain of the piece is, and it’s not the brothers, even if Hamilton and Parker firmly believe they are. And it adds to the harshness of the story that Hamilton never stops viewing the Howards as villains, even when he begins to work out why they’re robbing banks in the first place. Where the viewer can have a large degree of sympathy for their plight and their solution, Hamilton has only one judgment to give: they’re criminals, pure and simple.

Mackenzie keeps things this simple throughout, and does so against a backdrop of financial ruin and macho posturing that serves as a vindication for Tanner and Hamilton’s behaviour. Tanner’s a hothead, unpredictable and rash; you never know if he’s going to jeopardise Toby’s plan or see it through without incident. Foster has played this kind of role before, but here he injects a sense of melancholy that makes Tanner more tragic than perhaps he has a right to be. It makes his performance all the more impressive: Foster knows that Tanner is as close to a stereotype as this movie gets, but he ignores that and makes the character as intriguing and beguiling in an off-kilter way as he can.

Bridges is equally impressive, his brooding, jowly features looking out and around from behind his sunglasses, his massively non-PC comments about his partner’s racial background funny, but only in a “long-time married couple” sense. But Sheridan’s script doesn’t let Hamilton have it all his own way. When he says, proudly, “This is what they call white man’s intuition,” Alberto is quick to respond, and in a perfectly deadpan manner: “Sometimes a blind pig finds a truffle.” All humour aside, though, Bridges projects a stern, authoritarian personality for Hamilton; he’s a man caught at the end of a career that has seen so many changes it’s almost overwhelming, so much so that once his retirement arrives, he can’t rest or leave the past behind.

These two roles, and the complexity that both actors bring to them, threaten to leave Pine way behind in the acting stakes, but he’s more than a match as the mastermind behind it all, his downtrodden, put-upon character finally taking a chance on himself in a desperate time of need. Pine isn’t exactly the most intuitive of actors – you can see the wheels turning in most of his performances – but here he does something quite remarkable: he imparts a stillness to the role that makes Toby all the more worthy of our time and attention. Foster may have the flashier role, but it’s Pine who provides the moral and emotional compass for the movie to navigate by.

All this is set against some stunning desert landscapes, perfectly lensed and lit by DoP Giles Nuttgens, and acting as unconcerned characters occasionally drafted into the story for effect. Those wide open expanses, with their unending vistas and rippling heat hazes speak of a far-off country where the promise of a better life is just over the horizon – if only the brothers could get there. But Toby’s plan is much more prosaic than that, and Mackenzie uses the character’s yearning for a better life for his children to highlight Toby’s innate nobility. Mackenzie and Nuttgens are aided by exceptional editing by Jake Roberts – the movie has an elegiac feel throughout that lends itself so well to the movie’s internal rhythm – and there’s a wonderfully melancholy, rueful score courtesy of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.

Rating: 9/10 – a movie that rewards the viewer on so many levels, Hell or High Water takes its financial vigilante characters down a hard road indeed, but makes the prize as compelling and profound as possible, and without dumbing down the narrative; the three leads are magnificent, and the whole mise-en-scene is handled with care and confidence by all concerned, leading to a movie that is by turns haunting, complex, thrilling, and emotionally draining.

Sully (2016)

04 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Aaron Eckhart, Airbus A320, Bird strike, Chesley Sullenberger, Clint Eastwood, Flight 1549, Hudson River, Laura Linney, NTSB, Pilot, Tom Hanks, True story

aka Sully: Miracle on the Hudson

D: Clint Eastwood / 96m

Cast: Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart, Laura Linney, Mike O’Malley, Jamey Sheridan, Anna Gunn, Holt McCallany, Ann Cusack, Molly Hagan, Jane Gabbert, Sam Huntington, Michael Rapaport

On 15 January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 from LaGuardia, New York to Charlotte, North Carolina, suffered a catastrophic bird strike that left both engines disabled. It had been in the air for approximately three minutes, and its pilot, Captain Chesley Sullenberger (Hanks) had to make a decision: to turn back and attempt an emergency landing at either LaGuardia or nearby Teterboro Airport, or make a forced water landing on the Hudson River. Sullenberger was certain he wouldn’t make it back to either airport and so adopted the latter option. With one hundred and fifty-five people on board, it was a manoeuvre that could have ended in tragedy, but thanks to Sullenberger’s forty year-plus experience, he was able to land the plane safely. And with the emergency services and local commercial vessels quickly on the scene, the passengers and crew were rescued in under twenty-five minutes. Later, a representative of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said that it “has to go down [as] the most successful ditching in aviation history.”

Such an event was always likely to be transferred to the big screen, and in the hands of veteran director Clint Eastwood, the story of Chesley Sullenberger and Flight 1549 has been granted a sober re-telling that suits both the man and the nature of the landing. On the surface, Sully is a movie that seems far removed from the intensity and heightened emotion of the event itself, as much of what occurs is played out against a wintry visual patina in keeping with the time the forced landing took place. But like Sullenberger himself, Eastwood – in terms of directing – has over forty years’ experience behind him, and in bringing Todd Karmanicki’s script to the screen he adopts a straitlaced, measured approach to the material that avoids any possibility of sensationalism or unnecessary hyperbole.

This is important because while the story of Flight 1549 is one of heroism on an unprecedented level – as Sully himself says at one point: “Everything is unprecedented until it happens for the first time” – the forced water landing isn’t the focus of the movie, even though we see it from two different perspectives. The focus is Sullenberger himself, a self-contained, humble man who found himself questioning his actions in the wake of the forced landing. It may seem counter-intuitive to examine the mindset of a hero suffering doubts in the aftermath of the very act that defines them as a hero, but it’s what makes Sully a much more rewarding experience than you might expect.

This decision is aided immeasurably by Hanks’s performance as Sullenberger. Anyone who’s seen Captain Phillips (2013) should remember the final scene where Phillips is being tended to by a navy medic, and the shock of what he’s been through begins to hit home. It’s a bravura moment, with Hanks’ expression telling you everything you need to know about how he’s feeling. He does the same here, brilliantly revealing the tremendous doubts Sullenberger experiences immediately following the landing and later during the NTSB investigation. As he imagines what could have happened, such as the plane crashing into the centre of Manhattan, Hanks is completely convincing as a man whose instinctive response to impending disaster saved the lives of so many. As he struggles to accept his own role in the forced landing, and what it means not just for himself and everyone else aboard, but for a wider public for whom plane crashes in New York have a whole different meaning, Hanks ensures that Sullenberger’s humility and humanity remain to the fore throughout. This is a man who wouldn’t rest until he knew everyone on board was safe and alive.

Hanks’ performance anchors the movie in a way that allows the script to explore the complex relationship between a man and his view of himself in exceptional circumstances. The actor adequately portrays the effect of the enormity of what happened on Sullenberger, and the lingering, pessimistic anxiety that threatened to undermine his self-confidence. For the purpose of the movie, that anxiety is allowed to overshadow his heroism, and through the one-sided machinations of the NTSB investigation, to be brought into question. But while Sullenberger’s heroism is never in any doubt, the NTSB investigation reveals a tactless insincerity about the nature of corporate responsibility, as it puts more faith in computer simulations that say the plane could have landed safely at LaGuardia, than the experience and knowledge of one of the best pilots around.

This is not the script or the movie’s finest hour. Demonising the Board and its representatives is the movie’s one truly sour note, a decision no doubt arrived at to offset a perceived lack of drama elsewhere. In these instances, there aren’t any bad guys, but Karmanicki ensures that the Board in this movie are emotionally hostile, professionally obtuse, and working to an unspecified agenda. It’s like watching a McCarthy hearing all over again, and Eastwood doesn’t make any attempt to downplay the Board members’ hostility to Sullenberger and his co-pilot, Jeff Skiles (Eckhart), until the error of the Board’s ways can be confirmed once and for all as both unrealistic and a poor narrative choice.

Hanks aside, this isn’t a movie where the performances are required to be more than perfunctory, although Linney as Sullenberger’s wife, Lorraine, is memorable thanks to the odd cadence of her portrayal and an underlying, yet unconfirmed, sense that all isn’t well in their marriage. As Skiles, Eckhart sports a moustache that seems to have been flown in from the Seventies, while the three-headed “monster” that is the Board (O’Malley, Sheridan and Gunn) is treated so unfairly – and so at odds with what really happened – that all three border on caricature, an unfortunate choice that doesn’t do the movie any dramatic favours.

The movie concludes with Sullenberger achieving a victory over the Board that allows for a moment of narrative grandstanding, and which is at odds with Sullenberger’s introspective nature. It also appears to offer a feelgood moment when the feelgood moment of the movie has already passed: the moment when it’s confirmed that everyone got off the plane and everyone has survived. But Eastwood uses these moments to highlight just how much of a big deal Sullenberger’s actions actually were. And why shouldn’t he be feted and applauded? To everyone outside the Board, he’s a bona fide hero, doubts and all. He’s an heroic individual, and the movies love those kind of characters (possibly) above all else. And they love them even more if they don’t automatically embrace that heroism.

Rating: 7/10 – memorable more for its examination of a man uncomfortable with the notion of being a hero than the actions that gained him that title, Sully is a muted drama that never quite “soars” in the way that audiences may expect, but which hits home in several unexpected ways instead; bolstered by a terrific, awards-worthy performance from Hanks, this is a quietly impressive movie that benefits from not embracing the standard tropes of the “hero” drama, and proves surprisingly rewarding as a result.

Xmas Classics – Gremlins (1984)

03 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Black comedy, Chris Columbus, Drama, Gizmo, Hoyt Axton, Joe Dante, Kingston Falls, Mogwai, Phoebe Cates, Review, Stripe, Xmas Classics, Zach Galligan

D: Joe Dante / 106m

Cast: Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, Hoyt Axton, Polly Holliday, Frances Lee McCain, Scott Brady, Jonathan Banks, Dick Miller, Judge Reinhold, Glynn Turman, Corey Feldman, Keye Luke, Edward Andrews, Harry Carey Jr

In amidst all the destruction and mayhem caused by the Gremlins of the title, Phoebe Cates’s bank teller (and barmaid) Kate Beringer takes time out to tell fellow bank teller Billy Peltzer (Galligan) the reason why she hates Xmas. It’s an awful tale, simply but effectively told by Cates, and at the end of it, you can understand exactly what she means. And in a movie that thrives on being as subversive as possible, it’s the most subversive moment in the entire movie. Forget about the Gremlins singing along to “Hi-ho! Hi-ho! It’s off to work we go” from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) – “They’re watching Snow White. And they love it.” – or having one of them “expose” himself to Kate, her monologue sums up everything that the movie wants to say about the festive season: it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

And yet, despite this, Gremlins occupies a warm place in the hearts and minds of pretty much everyone who’s ever seen it. Despite the way in which it trashes several Xmas conventions – peace and goodwill to all men? Yeah, right – Gremlins is a movie that always satisfies, no matter how often you watch it. Right from the start, when Hoyt Axton’s terrible inventor, Randall Peltzer, tries to impress upon kindly Chinese store owner Mr Wing (Luke) the virtues of the Bathroom Buddy, it’s clear that nothing’s going to go right for him, or for anyone else in the movie. And that’s part of the movie’s charm: waiting to see just how bad it gets.

And so, we settle in to wait, to see just how bad it will get. Along the way we see some other examples of Randall’s knack for building inventions that don’t work, such as the clockwork egg slicer, and we meet the horrible Mrs Deagle (Holliday), a character so odious that she regales Billy with thinly veiled threats about what she would do to his dog, Barney, if she had her way. And then there’s Judge Reinhold’s preening, acid-tongued assistant bank manager, Gerald, a nasty piece of work who wouldn’t hesitate to fire Billy if he had the chance. And lastly, dear old Murray Futterman (Miller), an ex-GI with a racist streak that’s wider than the Grand Canyon. It seems the town of Kingston Falls isn’t quite the nice little town it appears to be.

Inevitably, little Gizmo begets a quintet of other furry Mogwai, led by the very anti-social Stripe. The story then introduces us to Mr Hanson (Turman), the local science teacher. Billy gives him one of the Mogwai, and though Mr Hanson’s intentions aren’t as cruel or nefarious as some of the other characters we’ve met, it’s when he starts performing multiple blood tests on the creature that we know he’s got to go on the Naughty List with Mrs Deagle et al. And then, the creature gets to eat after midnight…

While this particular Gremlin is claiming his revenge, Stripe and his scaly cohorts are wreaking havoc in the Peltzer kitchen. At this point, the movie does something unexpected. With all the horrible people living in Kingston Falls for the Gremlins to exact “justice” on, it’s the quiet, unassuming (and nice) Lynn Peltzer (McCain) that is one of the first targets (after the unfortunate Barney of course). What follows is one of the movie’s best sequences, as Lynn takes the fight to the Gremlins after the initial shock of finding them in her kitchen has worn off. Watch McCain closely as she goes from frightened housewife to tough-as-nails Gremlin-killer; it’s a standout moment for the actress, a once-in-a-career opportunity that she grabs with both hands and, in today’s modern parlance, “smashes”.

And just as inevitably as Gizmo begat Stripe and friends, so Stripe begats hundreds more of the little blighters, and they proceed to go on a rampage through the town. The movie transforms itself from a charming, slightly innocuous looking family feature into a full-on riotous comedy horror, and for the next forty-five minutes there’s more mayhem and anti-social behaviour on display than in a raft of Seth Rogen movies. And Mr Hanson’s death isn’t the only one. What is happening? How can a movie that’s introduced us to such a cute and cuddly little creature suddenly go all psycho on us?

Of course, the movie is called Gremlins, and not Mogwai. But the best thing about Joe Dante’s inspired direction (working from an equally inspired script by Chris Columbus) is that he embraces the carnage. He’s keen to show off all the terrible things that the Gremlins are capable of, and he’s just as keen to revel in it all. He encourages the viewer to do the same, to enjoy the town’s destruction, to cheer it on even though the “good” townsfolk of Kingston Falls need to be saved from this unexpected retribution. It’s yet another example of how subversive Gremlins is: you can’t help but cheer them on.

With that in mind, it also explains why Billy and Kate are so dull. As central characters you should want to like them, but Dante isn’t interested in having us root for them. Sure, they have to win out in the end – in 1984, even the most subversive of mainstream movies couldn’t let evil triumph over good – but they’re just so uninspiring, and so bland. You get the feeling that if they were to have children their offspring would be the most boring kids alive. But against Stripe and his tribe of over-achieving disaster-mongers, Billy and Kate can’t help but look and feel tedious and simple-minded. It’s a contrast the movie has to stick with, but certainly, there are times when you wish they weren’t.

In the end, good does triumph over evil, and the Gremlins are vanquished. But just as the viewer prepares to endure the feelgood homilies that are part and parcel of ordinary US home life at Xmas (especially in the movies), the script has one last trick to play on the viewer, one last subversive moment to round things off with. Mr Wing shows up to collect Gizmo, and in the process, makes it clear that the Peltzer’s are entirely irresponsible, and don’t deserve to keep the furry little creature. Just as they’re congratulating themselves on saving the town (what’s left of it), the movie reins them in and reminds them (and us) that if it wasn’t for them, then none of it would have happened in the first place. It’s a great way to end a movie (even if they had to go and spoil it by hinting that Billy might have a shot at being responsible in the future), and leaves only one question unanswered: if all the Gremlins bar Stripe were blown up in the movie theatre, does that include the ones that were busy disrupting Rockin’ Ricky Rialto’s radio show?

Rating: 9/10 – an Eighties movie that – surprisingly – hasn’t dated, Gremlins is a classic of narrative misdirection and sly, devilish humour; watch it with a jaundiced eye and you’ll get much more out of it than if you were to take it at face value, and be prepared to be entertained on such a darkly comic level that you’ll be wondering for a long time to come, if Gremlins is really the family movie it appears to be.

NOTE: This is the first of four Xmas Classics to be featured on thedullwoodexperiment. The other three will appear between now and Xmas Day.

Come and Find Me (2016)

02 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Aaron Paul, Annabelle Wallis, Disappearance, Drama, Garret Dillahunt, Mystery, Review, Romance, Thriller, Zack Whedon

D: Zack Whedon / 112m

Cast: Aaron Paul, Annabelle Wallis, Garret Dillahunt, Dean Redman, Zachary Knighton, Enver Gjokaj, Terry Chen, Michael Kopsa

The Black List is an annual survey of the “most liked” motion picture screenplays not yet produced. 2012 was a pretty good year, with screenplays for the likes of Arrival, John Wick, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and Hell or High Water all making the list. But so did the screenplay for Come and Find Me, which just goes to show that the Black List doesn’t always get it right.

Written by Zack Whedon (brother of Josh), the script aims for being several things at once: a romantic drama, a thriller, and a mystery. In addition, it seeks to include meditations on what it is to really know someone, and the permanence of love. It’s an ambitious script, and one that has clear intentions to be more than just another run-of-the-mill why-has-my-girlfriend-suddenly-disappeared-when-we-were-so-happy-together? style of movie. Signs of these intentions can be seen throughout Come and Find Me’s drawn-out running time, but however effective these elements may have been on the page, it’s Whedon the director who sabotages any chances they had of being just as effective on the screen.

At the beginning, Aaron Paul’s graphic web designer, David, gets on a bus where he spots an attractive blonde (Wallis). When she gets off the bus, so does he. He follows her. Eventually she turns and asks him bluntly if he’s following her. David looks appalled, says no, and carries on past her. Soon, she is following him until they reach a house that they both claim is where they live. David opens the door, the woman goes in without being invited. Inside they find a photograph that shows they know each other… Now, at this point, viewers who have seen way too many movies will know exactly what happens next. But for anyone who hasn’t seen way too many movies, this is an exciting start: how can two people live in the same house and apparently not know each other? Is this going to be some kind of variation on The Lake House (2006)?

Well, no, it isn’t. If Whedon had written a mystery drama that evolved from this opening sequence, and had kept the mystery unfolding piece by tantalising piece then Come and Find Me would have been an entertaining, enjoyable movie. But instead, he explains away this early “mystery” and goes in a different direction altogether – but one we’ve seen in the movies, and on television, and in books and plays, time and time again. And he doesn’t bring anything new to the table, or find a way of presenting his tale with any kind of visual flair or panache.

After watching Come and Find Me for a while – say, twenty minutes – the average viewer will be wondering if the bland shooting style, with its dour lighting scheme and flat imagery, is going to continue throughout. Well, it does. Whedon’s framing is a major letdown (which makes you wonder if DoP Sean Steigemeier had any say in the matter), and he constantly shoots from a low angle, as if this will add to the drama unfolding on screen. But all it does is prove annoying and distracting, and make the average viewer wonder if Steigemeier’s back was okay, what with all this low level camera work. With its drab interior design adding to the movie’s visual problems, even when it heads out into the countryside, Whedon and his crew do their best to downplay any of Nature’s beauty. A shot from the top of a hillside looking toward a row of other hills should be a jaw-dropper; instead it’s literally, just a backdrop.

But even that isn’t the worst of the movie’s problems under Whedon’s stewardship. The central mystery, once it’s explained, proves to be underwhelming, but there’s still a long way to go as David engages in a less-than-riveting series of bluff and counter-bluff in his efforts to bring the bad guys to… to… well, actually, we never know if he’s looking for justice, revenge, a combination of the two, or something else entirely, as Whedon doesn’t think to tell us. Throughout, David has one motivation: to find out what happened to his girlfriend, Claire. But he does so in such a ham-fisted, you-won’t-believe-he-did-that kind of way that it’s a wonder he gets as far as he does. He’s a passive-aggressive victim who’s never as ahead of the game as he thinks he is, and as a result, and despite Paul’s best efforts, he remains unsympathetic throughout.

Paul is a good choice for the character of David, but like so much of the movie, is undermined by Whedon’s inexperience in the director’s chair. Everyone else is a supporting character, and though the likes of Dillahunt and Gjokaj do their best with less than challenging material, there’s no chance than anyone is going to stand out from the crowd. Even Wallis, whose role is largely seen through a variety of flashbacks, gets to be less than a fully fledged character and more of a cypher; or more awkwardly, a McGuffin.

When it comes to first-time writer/directors, Whedon is another in a long line of movie makers who believe they can get it right on their maiden attempt, but often the opposite is true. Such is the case with Come and Find Me. Perhaps there should be a moratorium on first-time writer/directors. Perhaps directors shouldn’t make their own scripts until they’ve been directing for a while, and have worked on other writers’ scripts. Perhaps then they’ll have a better understanding of how to assemble a movie without undermining it at the very same time. Who knows? It might lead to them making better movies.

Rating: 4/10 – leaden, and with an ending that will leave most viewers slack-jawed through disbelief, Come and Find Me is a misfire on almost every level; lacking a clear purpose, or any depth or subtext, the movie plods along, then stumbles along, then plods along again etc. in its quest to be an absorbing mystery thriller, when it’s plain to see that it’s so far from that ambition as to be in a different universe altogether.

Monthly Roundup – November 2016

01 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Action, Adam Schindler, All'ultimo sangue, Andrew Stanton, Animation, Annalise Basso, Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies, Beth Riesgraf, Bury Them Deep, Colin Firth, Comedy, Craig Hill, Dominik Hartl, Drama, Elizabeth Reaser, Ellen DeGeneres, Ettore Manni, Felicity Jones, Finding Dory, Fort Osage, Gabriela Marcinková, Home invasion, Horror, Inferno (2016), Laurie Calvert, Lesley Selander, Literary adaptation, Mike Flanagan, Ouija: Origin of Evil, Paolo Moffa, Patrick Dempsey, Plague virus, Prequel, Renée Zellweger, Rod Cameron, Romance, Romantic comedy, Ron Howard, Rory Culkin, Sequel, Sharon Maguire, Shut In, Ski-ing, Thriller, Tom Hanks, Western

Bury Them Deep (1968) / D: Paolo Moffa (as John Byrd) / 109m

Original title: All’ultimo sangue

Cast: Craig Hill, Ettore Manni, Giovanni Cianfriglia (as Ken Wood), José Greci, Francesco Santovetti, Luciano Doria, Pino Patti (as Giuseppe Sorrentino), Ruggero Salvadori

Rating: 5/10 – when an Army payroll is stolen by notorious outlaw Billy Gun (Cianfriglia), expert tracker Clive Norton (Hill) is hired to get it back, but in the process he finds himself up against a variety of obstacles, not the least of which is Billy’s brother, El Chaleco (Manni); an average Spaghetti Western given a much needed dose of energy thanks to Manni’s muscular, spirited performance as the conniving El Chaleco, Bury Them Deep rarely rises above its perfunctory level, and despite cramming in several lengthy action sequences.

Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016) / D: Mike Flanagan / 99m

Cast: Elizabeth Reaser, Annalise Basso, Lulu Wilson, Henry Thomas, Parker Mack

Rating: 6/10 – it’s 1965, and the Zander family – single mother Alice (Reaser) and her two daughters, Lina (Basso) and Doris (Wilson) – become imperilled by an evil spirit thanks to the misguided use of a ouija board; a prequel to the events seen in Ouija (2014), this does nothing new in terms of scares and special effects, but thanks to the involvement of Flanagan, at least gives you characters you can actually relate to and care about, and which is a rare and valuable thing indeed.

Finding Dory (2016) / D: Andrew Stanton, Angus MacLane / 97m

Cast: Ellen DeGeneres, Albert Brooks, Ed O’Neill, Kaitlin Olson, Hayden Rolence, Ty Burrell, Diane Keaton, Eugene Levy, Sloane Murray, Idris Elba, Dominic West, Bob Peterson, Kate McKinnon, Bill Hader, Sigourney Weaver

Rating: 7/10 – Dory the blue tang fish (DeGeneres) starts having flashbacks to when she was younger and lived with her parents, and these in turn prompt her to try and find them, much to the continuing consternation of clown fish Marlin (Brooks) and his more positive son Nemo (Rolence); a sequel to one of Pixar’s most cherished movies, and one of this year’s most anticipated releases, Finding Dory lacks the original movie’s winning charm, and settles instead for being a guilty pleasure retread of Finding Nemo, while being saved from a lower score thanks to DeGeneres wonderful, and still inspired, vocal performance.

Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016) / D: Sharon Maguire / 123m

Cast: Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth, Patrick Dempsey, Sarah Solemani, Gemma Jones, Jim Broadbent, Emma Thompson, Neil Pearson, Joanna Scanlan, Kate O’Flynn, Celia Imrie, Ed Sheeran

Rating: 7/10 – at the dreadfully old age of forty-three, Bridget (Zellweger) feels like love is passing her by, until two one night stands – with old flame Mark Darcy (Firth) and new beau Jack Qwant (Dempsey) – lead to her being pregnant but unsure as to which one of them is the father; a welcome return for Bridget, and with much of the pizzazz and feelgood humour of the first movie, but the whole “who’s the father?” storyline is a poor conceit to hang a whole movie on, and it shows, leaving standout moments such as Bridget miming to House of Pain’s Jump Around, as a much better reason for splurging on this latest installment.

Shut In (2015) / D: Adam Schindler / 90m

aka Deadly Home; Intruders

Cast: Beth Riesgraf, Rory Culkin, Martin Starr, Jack Kesy, Joshua Mikel, Leticia Jiminez, Timothy T. McKinney

Rating: 5/10 – when Anna (Riesgraf), who’s agoraphobic, doesn’t attend her recently deceased brother’s funeral, the three men who arrive at her home to rob her soon find that Anna has a dark secret that will endanger them all; a brave attempt to do something different in the home invasion genre, Shut In nevertheless remains an intriguing idea that never coalesces into a completely successful whole, but does feature a terrific performance from Riesgraf.

Inferno (2016) / D: Ron Howard / 121m

Cast: Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Omar Sy, Irrfan Khan, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Ben Foster, Ana Ularu, Ida Darvish

Rating: 6/10 – despite suffering from short term memory loss, symbologist Robert Langdon must endure a race against time in order to stop the release of a deadly toxin that will wipe out billions of people; another year, another Dan Brown adaptation, but this time it’s an adaptation that’s at least bearable, thanks to Tom Elkins’ and Daniel P. Hanley’s editing skills, an enjoyable, knowing performance from Khan, and a script that doesn’t hang around getting bogged down by endless exposition, which, considering Brown’s reliance on it in his novels, is a massive step forward should The Lost Symbol or any further novels be adapted for the screen.

Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies (2016) / D: Dominik Hartl / 77m

Cast: Laurie Calvert, Gabriela Marcinková, Oscar Dyekjær Giese, Margarete Tiesel, Karl Fischer, Patricia Aulitzky, Kari Rakkola

Rating: 5/10 – a formula for producing snow proves extremely harmful if ingested, and soon the guests at a remote mountain top ski resort are knee deep in zombies, both human and animal; similar in tone to the Dead Snow movies, Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies combines daft humour with gross-out gore and flying body parts a-plenty, but as usual with this type of movie, it pays lip service to cohesive plotting, or credible characters, and focuses instead on providing a series of inventive zombie kills – which is pretty much the only aspect it gets right.

Fort Osage (1952) / D: Lesley Selander / 72m

Cast: Rod Cameron, Jane Nigh, Morris Ankrum, Douglas Kennedy, John Ridgely

Rating: 6/10 – homesteaders looking to head west through Indian country are exploited by a crooked businessman (Ankrum) and have their lives put at risk by his decision to cheat said Indians out of the rewards of a peace treaty, leaving would-be wagonmaster Tom Clay (Cameron) to get the bottom of all the corruption; an enjoyable way to spend seventy-two minutes thanks to Selander’s typically intuitive direction, Cameron’s no-nonsense approach to dialogue, and the joy of watching so many standard Western tropes being trotted out and given such a good airing.

Mini-Review: Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words (2015)

30 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Alicia Vikander, Career, Diaries, Diary entries, Documentary, Hollywood, Home movies, Isabella Rossellini, Pia Lindström, Review, Stig Björkman, Sweden

Original title: Jag är Ingrid

D: Stig Björkman / 114m

With: Ingrid Bergman (archive footage), Alicia Vikander, Pia Lindström, Roberto Rossellini Jr, Isabella Rossellini, Isotta Rossellini, Sigourney Weaver, Liv Ullmann

An accomplished, award-winning actress, Ingrid Bergman was also an inveterate diarist and she kept hours upon hours of home movie footage across all three of her marriages, along with thousands of photographs. She charted her life and career through these recorded memories, and would often find herself looking back at favourite moments whenever the mood took her. And thanks to all this “memory hoarding”, Bergman has provided the platform on which movie maker Stig Björkman has assembled a captivating, insightful documentary on the star herself.

Told in the style of a not-quite linear autobiography, Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words offers a succession of affecting, candid scenes from Bergman’s life that are punctuated by talking heads recollections from her children and others, and Vikander reading the actress’s personal letters and diary entries. Bergman’s childhood and close, formative relationship with her father is covered, as are her first excursions in front of the camera in a series of Swedish movies. Her first marriage to brain surgeon Petter Lindström reveals a young woman on the brink of stardom and enjoying every aspect of the Hollywood experience that would ultimately see them split up.

From this, it becomes clear that Bergman was committed more to her career than she was to her daughter, Pia, a circumstance that carried on when she had her children with Roberto Rossellini. Whether this was a conscious choice or not isn’t made clear but it does speak to Bergman’s desire to act above everything else. It also helps to explain how she was able to leave Hollywood for Italy and a period in her life when she was pilloried in the press for “abandoning” Petter and Pia. From there the movie covers the late Forties and her career resurgence thanks to Anastasia (1956), and her third marriage to theatrical producer Lars Schmidt. An inevitable collaboration with fellow Swede Ingmar Bergman on Autumn Sonata (1978) follows on, until her death from breast cancer in 1982.

The movie stresses Bergman’s dedication to her career (a little too much at times), but it also highlights just how much she enjoyed life and made as much of it as she could. Her children’s thoughts often provide an alternative viewpoint, but their love for her is evident throughout, even though she was largely an absent presence in their lives (all of them wish they could have had more time with her, but don’t begrudge her absence at all). The various archival elements are compiled with a great deal of care, and are fascinating for their candour and historical relevance. It all goes to prove that, despite some controversial (for the time) personal decisions, Bergman was admired and respected by pretty much everyone she came into contact with.

Rating: 7/10 – as a straightforward, no frills documentary, Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words works incredibly well in spite of lacking any appreciable depth, but Björkman assembles the varied materials with skill; a knowing and affectionate tribute to an actress who David O. Selznick referred to as “the most completely conscientious actress” he had ever worked with, this is for fans and newcomers alike.

Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)

30 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Adventure, Animation, Art Parkinson, Charlize Theron, Drama, Fantasy, Laika, Matthew McConaughey, Moon King, Ralph Fiennes, Review, Travis Knight

D: Travis Knight / 102m

Cast: Charlize Theron, Art Parkinson, Matthew McConaughey, Ralph Fiennes, Rooney Mara, Brenda Vaccaro, George Takei, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa

In Ancient Japan, a young mother, Sariatu (Theron), is washed ashore with her infant son, Kubo. She is fleeing her family: her father, the Moon King (Fiennes) and her two sisters (both Mara). Her sisters have killed her husband, Hanzo, and stolen Kubo’s left eye for their father; and now he wants Kubo’s other eye. The infant grows into a young boy (Parkinson) who looks after his mother by night, and by day, tells stories to the folk in the nearby village, and who uses the magic he’s inherited from his mother to animate pieces of paper to help tell his tales. Kubo is well-liked, but often he can’t finish his stories because he has to be back before sunset, or his aunts will find him.

When an Obon festival proves too tempting to miss, Kubo finds himself still near the village when night – and his aunts – descend. They attack him, but he’s saved by the intervention of his mother; later she succumbs to her sisters and Kubo is left alone… though not for long. He finds he has a companion on a trek to track down his father’s sword, armour and helmet. The companion is called Monkey (Theron), and she was once a little wooden snow monkey charm that Kubo carried with him everywhere. Now she acts as his guide and protector, as the pair set off to find Hanzo’s equipment. Along the way they meet Beetle (McConaughey), one of Hanzo’s apprentices, who agrees to go with them.

They find the sword in a cave full of bones, and cross the Long Lake in a boat woven together by leaves and thanks to Kubo’s magic. But they’re attacked by Sariatu’s sisters, just as Kubo attempts to retrieve the armour from the bottom of the lake. With only the helmet to be retrieved, the trio travel to Hanzo’s home where Kubo has a dream about an old man (Fiennes). Tricked into travelling to the village near where he lived, Kubo must face the Moon King alone, and find a way of avoiding the fates of his mother and father.

A vibrant, multi-layered fantasy adventure, Kubo and the Two Strings is animation company Laika’s fourth release, following Coraline (2009), ParaNorman (2012), and The Boxtrolls (2014). With such a track record already firmly in place, the chances of Kubo… not adding to that run of successes seems unlikely, and on a critical level, so it proves. But in a year when animation has accounted for three of the top five grossing movies, Laika’s latest has stumbled at the box office, only just earning back its budget. And yet, it’s easily better than two of those three top grossing movies – Finding Dory and The Secret Life of Pets – and on a par with the third, Zootopia. With its impressive visuals, cleverly constructed storyline, and accessible characters, Kubo and the Two Strings is a triumph that brings together those aforementioned elements, and compliments them with style, originality and verve.

It’s all due to the script by Marc Haimes and Chris Butler, and the efforts of first-time director Knight (he’s also Laika’s president and CEO). There’s such a richess of detail, both in the dialogue and the characters, that the visual backgrounds and their immediate surroundings don’t always register as the beautifully created world that said characters exist in. Ancient Japan has been witnessed in so many other movies over the years that it should be hard to bring a fresh perspective to the period and the milieu. But Laika’s expert team of animators – working with CGI and traditional stop-frame animation – achieve the movie’s distinctive look with ease, blending the two animation formats to perfection and helping the viewer immerse themselves in this beautiful yet dangerous environment.

The animators have done their homework too. The sisters’ fighting styles are straight out of several highly successful martial arts/wire-fu movies, and there’s a crispness to the movements of the characters when in combat that is both arresting and profound (if you think that’s a little over the top for an animated movie, then just watch the scene where the sisters attack the boat, and see just how much effort has gone into making their actions so intense and so precise, and so exciting). There’s also an energy in these scenes that doesn’t appear anywhere else in the movie, and while that may sound like a criticism, there’s nothing anyone could – or should – do about it. (And that goes for the eyes in the sea, one of the most remarkable visual effects seen in recent years.)

With its themes of loss and regret, and love and perseverance, the movie isn’t quite the children’s feature that some viewers may be expecting, but Laika have always been most impressive when introducing adult themes into their projects, and Kubo… is no exception. By adding depth to Kubo’s quest, and by introducing a layer of melancholy to it all, Knight and his team create a dynamic among the characters – good and bad – that can be appreciated by viewers of (nearly) all ages. It’s a delicate balancing act but one they pull off with unwavering conviction. And the way in which Kubo’s quest is resolved, and the Moon King’s threat is neutralised, it’s all accomplished in such a constructive, intelligent – and affecting – way that it offers viewers a much more satisfying conclusion all round.

As usual with a Laika production, the voice cast has been chosen with care. Theron brings a tenderness and subtlety to her performances that works perfectly for both characters, while McConaughey injects a mix of broad and pointed humour into his role as Beetle (even if his Southern drawl is allowed to slip through too often to maintain any consistency of voice). Parkinson effectively portrays the sadness and hopeful determination that combine to push Kubo ever forward, Mara essays the sisters as chilling echoes of each other, and Fiennes is formidable as the Moon King.

Rating: 9/10 – very minor quibbles aside, Kubo and the Two Strings is another triumph for Laika, and one of the very best animated movies of this or any other year; touching, poignant and thrilling, it features ravishing animation, terrifying villains, and speaks to the viewer on an emotional level that most live action movies fail to come even close to.

The Dressmaker (2015)

28 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

1951, Australia, Comedy, Drama, Dressmaking, Dungatar, Hugo Weaving, Jocelyn Moorhouse, Judy Davis, Kate Winslet, Literary adaptation, Mystery, Revenge, Review, Sarah Snook

D: Jocelyn Moorhouse / 119m

Cast: Kate Winslet, Judy Davis, Liam Hemsworth, Hugo Weaving, Sarah Snook, Kerry Fox, Shane Bourne, Alison Whyte, Caroline Goodall, James Mackay, Sacha Horler, Gyton Grantley, Julia Blake, Barry Otto, Rory Potter

It’s Australia, and it’s 1951. The tiny rural town of Dungatar sees the return of Myrtle “Tilly” Dunnage (Winslet) after having been sent away as a child twenty-five years before for the suspected murder of Stewart Pettyman (Potter), the son of town councillor Evan Pettyman (Bourne). She’s back for two reasons: to look after her mother, Molly (Davis), who is suffering from dementia, and to discover the truth about what happened twenty-five years ago (Tilly doesn’t remember). The townsfolk aren’t exactly pleased to see her, with only Sergeant Farrat (Weaving) treating her fairly. Unconcerned, Tilly goes about caring for her mother, while also stirring things up around town, appearing in sexy, haute couture gowns and turning the heads of all the eligible and not-so-eligible men, and in particular, Teddy McSwiney (Hemsworth).

With the townsfolk treating her with suspicion and disrespect, she lets them know that she can make any of them bespoke dresses or outfits. Her first customer is young bride-to-be Gertrude Pratt (Snook). Going against her mother’s wishes, Gertrude is over the moon with the dress Tilly makes for her, and it’s not long before most of the women in town have followed suit. Pettyman employs the services of another dressmaker, Una Pleasance (Horler), but her efforts aren’t anywhere near as successful. Meanwhile, Tilly begins a tentative relationship with Teddy, while her mother’s memory improves, and her investigation into what happened to Stewart Pettyman starts to gather momentum.

Along the way, town secrets are exposed, simmering animosities boil over, and Tilly’s skills as a dressmaker serve as a way of exacting revenge for the way she was treated as a child. Answers are revealed, lives are changed irrevocably, a tragedy ensues, and Dungatar’s entry into a local Eisteddfod affords Tilly the opportunity to carry out her ultimate revenge.

An adaptation of the novel by Rosalie Ham, The Dressmaker is a mixed bag indeed. Combining drama, comedy and romance, and mashing them all together (sometimes in the same scene), it’s a movie that is likely to divide audiences into two camps: those who prefer to have their revenge dramas played entirely straight throughout, and those who prefer to have their comedies unspoiled by dramatic stretches that restrict the belly laughs found elsewhere. Your tolerance for this mash-up will depend very much on going with the movie’s very particular flow, as Moorhouse and her co-screenwriter, husband P.J. Hogan, have embraced both the jaundiced drama and the wicked comedy inherent in Ham’s novel.

The result is a movie that’s tonally uneven and switches focus from comedy to drama and back again with unrestrained abandon. Moorhouse concentrates on the humour during the first hour, and gifts Davis with some great lines, some of them throwaways that make you wish the actress had made more comedies before this. When Tilly tells Gertrude the cost of the dress she wants made, Gertrude remarks that the cost is “outrageous”. Quick as a flash, Molly says, “So’s your bum.” Davis’ timing is simply brilliant. There are other moments that are equally as funny, and the cast can be seen to be enjoying themselves tremendously during these scenes. But all good things must come to an end, and the movie’s second half slowly sheds the comedy in order to concentrate more fully, and with more necessity, on the drama.

But as well as shedding the humour, the script also sheds the shading and carefully orchestrated character beats, and leaves the viewer overwhelmed by increasing levels of melodrama. As well as the tragedy already alluded to, there is madness, murder, and extended bouts of retribution. There’s so much in fact, that Moorhouse struggles to find a way of making it all feel organic, with most scenes feeling forced by the need for resolution of the various subplots involving the townsfolk. By the time Tilly leaves Dungatar behind, the viewer may well be heaving a sigh of relief before laughing in gratitude at her final line of dialogue.

Thankfully, the movie’s flaws are more than compensated for by the performances. Davis steals the movie as the raddled, alcoholic, dementia-suffering Molly. It’s possibly the least glamorous role you’re likely to see for some time, but Davis is superb in it, caustic and sharp despite the dementia, and effortlessly dominating the scenes she’s in. Alongside her, Winslet gives another impressive performance, expressing Tilly’s determination and anger at how she was treated as a child, and yet also displaying an uncertainty and a mistrust surrounding her memories of her childhood. There are moments where Winslet is called upon to point up the character’s emotional fragility, and she does so in such an honest way that it’s entirely credible.

In support, Weaving is a delight as the crossdressing Sergeant Farrat, fey on the one hand, sturdy on the other, and a hoot as Rudolph Valentino. Hemsworth does enough to avoid giving an entirely wooden performance, but against Winslet still looks like a complete amateur. Further down the list there are good roles for, and good performances from, the likes of Kerry Fox as the acid-tongued schoolteacher, Bourne as the philandering town councillor, Blake as the ailing wife of the town’s doctor (Otto), Snook as the initially vapid but later viperish Gertrude, and Grantley as Teddy’s brother, Barney, who holds the key to what happened to Stewart Pettyman.

As befits a movie concerned with dressmaking, the costumes, designed by Marion Boyce and Margot Wilson, are fantastic, beautiful creations that flatter and enhance the female cast they were made for in exactly the way they were meant to flatter and enhance the characters. Winslet gets to show off her curves in a variety of figure hugging outfits, and there’s one scene where the dress she wears is – in terms of the time in which the movie is set – a precursor to the one worn by Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita (1960). And the overall look of the movie is like that of a Western, with Tilly “riding” back into town as an avenging angel á la Clint Eastwood in Hang ‘Em High (1968) or Pale Rider (1985). There are other references to other movies, some quite easy to spot, and some more subtly placed, but these don’t detract from the movie at all, but do add to the fun that can be had (in the first hour).

Rating: 7/10 – on balance, The Dressmaker‘s imbalance in terms of its storyline and tone should make this at least an awkward or unfulfilling watch, but somehow it’s a movie where it works more often than it doesn’t; with a standout turn from Davis, ravishing costumes, and a spare visual sense that suits the material, this is one of those movies where it’s unlikely for two different viewers to come to a consensus – but strangely, that’s one of its strengths.

Snowden (2016)

27 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

CIA, Drama, Eavesdropping, Edward Snowden, Hong Kong, Joseph-Gordon-Levitt, Laura Poitras, Melissa Leo, NSA, Oliver Stone, Review, Rhys Ifans, Shailene Woodley, Thriller, Tom Wilkinson, True story, Whistleblower, Zachary Quinto

D: Oliver Stone / 134m

Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Rhys Ifans, Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto, Tom Wilkinson, Joely Richardson, Timothy Olyphant, Ben Schnetzer, Scott Eastwood, Lakeith Stanfield, Logan Marshall-Green, Ben Chaplin, Nicolas Cage

By now, most of us have heard of Edward Joseph Snowden (Gordon-Levitt), the NSA whistleblower who revealed the extent of the US’s surveillance programme both at home and abroad. In June 2013, Snowden flew to Hong Kong to meet with documentary movie maker Laura Poitras (Leo), and Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald (Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Wilkinson). There, at the Hotel Mira, Snowden explained his reasons for disclosing the documents he appropriated from NSA data banks, and why he felt that the extent of the US’s “eavesdropping” was both inappropriate and damaging to the integrity of the US and its intelligence-gathering agencies. Following the publication of the files Snowden provided, he was charged with offences under the 1917 Espionage Act*, and though he tried to reach South America via Russia and Cuba, his passport was revoked while he was en route to Russia, and he was forced to remain in the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. And Moscow – though not the airport – has been his home ever since.

Snowden’s story is one that seems tailor-made for an Oliver Stone movie. Anyone who’s seen his documentary series The Untold History of the United States (2012-13), or read the accompanying book, will know that Stone is largely unimpressed with the way in which his country has become a land run by self-serving neo-conservatives for whom “by any means necessary” is a proud motto. And while you could argue that this has been the status quo in America for a lot longer than the last fifty years, what is without doubt is the extent to which the intelligence agencies have abused their remits post-911 to eavesdrop not just on suspected terrorists but everyone. But with all this now out in the open, and Snowden’s place in history assured – and already explored in Laura Poitras’s excellent, Oscar-winning documentary CITIZENFOUR (2014) – what is there left for Stone to bring to the screen that hasn’t already been explored? Unfortunately, the answer is not much.

Watching Snowden is a somewhat dispiriting experience. Stone does what he does best over two and a quarter hours: exposing the clandestine activities of several branches of the US government, highlighting the insidious effects these activities are having on an individual’s human rights, and revealing how those same human rights aren’t even protected by the courts (who seem to be bypassed at every opportunity). But Stone’s usual passion and sense of outrage seems to be muted here. This is like watching a movie made by someone who’s intellectually aggrieved by what the NSA has been up to, but doesn’t quite feel the need to get emotional about it as well. This is Oliver Stone in restrained, almost reflective mode – and it doesn’t feel right.

What all this means is that Snowden feels like objective reportage for much of its running time, with scenes placed and set up to impart relevant information, allowing Stone and co-screenwriter Kieran Fitzgerald to give audiences all they need to know about Snowden himself and the secret world he was a part of. But it’s this matter-of-fact way in which Stone has decided to present both the man and that world that curtails any tension, and thereby lessens the drama. The scene where Snowden downloads a mass of files right from the heart of the NSA’s base in Hawaii, a scene that many directors could have made into a nerve-shredding exercise in trepidation and anxiety, lacks all those elements and plays out with a minimum of fuss and bother.

Watching as Snowden becomes increasingly aware of the extent of his country’s malfeasance – and the ways in which he’s unwittingly contributed to that malfeasance – Stone shows Snowden’s baffled disbelief, and his somewhat naïve demeanour, but there’s a distance between the viewer and the beleaguered whistleblower that stops any real sympathy or connection from forming. As Joseph Gordon-Levitt goes about the process of making Snowden’s initial commitment to the NSA appear noble and necessary, he can’t quite overcome a lack of personality that keeps the man from registering as more than a name most people will recognise, but few outside the US will truly care about. This is partly due to the script, which, instead of showing the man behind the name through his commitment to the truth, attempts to do so through his relationship with his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills (Woodley). Would that these scenes had more of an impact, but there’s a pedantic, going-through-the-motions feel to them that Stone can’t quite shake off. There are times where they also border on soap opera, as Mills’s frustration with Snowden’s work leads to several moments where she invokes the whole “it’s me or the job” ultimatum.

Elsewhere, the movie plods along, only occasionally engaging with the material in a way that appears earnest or committed, but doing enough to keep interested viewers interested, while not doing enough to keep viewers new to Snowden’s story on board for the duration. It’s not that Stone is doing anything particularly wrong – he still has a strong visual sense (bolstered by crisp, insistent cinematography from Anthony Dod Mantle), and the movie is expertly edited by Alex Marquez and Lee Percy – but somewhere along the way, any sense of urgency about the subject and its ramifications seems to have been lost. Perhaps it’s due to the time that’s passed since Snowden blew the whistle; in today’s need-to-know-now society is his story relevant anymore?

There are good performances all round, but mostly amongst the supporting turns, with Ifans a standout as Snowden’s mentor and über-spook Corbin O’Brien. Its also good to see Nicolas Cage, albeit in a minor role, deliver the kind of performance that we know he’s capable of. Spare a thought though for the trio of Leo, Quinto and Wilkinson, stranded in a hotel room in Hong Kong and not really given much to do except listen and look amazed/appalled/astounded as appropriate (it makes the scene where Greenwald barks orders at his editor (Richardson) all the more striking – and out of place). Woodley is hamstrung by a role that requires her to be unsupportive and selfish for the most part, and which is left hanging by a script that doesn’t explain why she’s now living with Snowden in Moscow. And as Snowden, Gordon-Levitt gives a diffident, constrained portrayal of a man who made a momentous personal and professional decision, and the actor carries the gravitas of that with aplomb. If only he didn’t sound like Keanu Reeves…

Rating: 6/10 – Stone adds another American life to his list of movie subjects, but in doing so seems more like a director for hire than the tirelessly challenging agent provocateur he usually is; what hampers Snowden is a sense that its story is no longer important, and that the movie is aware of this, which stops it from being the impassioned, thought-provoking movie it should be.

*The 1917 Espionage Act is a particularly apt (and predictable) piece of legislation for Snowden to be charged under. Such is the loose nature of the Act, if Snowden were to return to the US and be put on trial, he wouldn’t be able to use any information relating to the offence as evidence that he wasn’t guilty; because of the nature of the information he released, it would still be regarded as classified and therefore not admissible, and the jury wouldn’t be privy to it. And that’s without the cost of the defense itself: anywhere between $1 million and $3 million.

Trailers – Claire in Motion (2016), The Comedian (2016) and The Zookeeper’s Wife (2017)

25 Friday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Betsy Brandt, Comedy, Drama, Jessica Chastain, Previews, Robert De Niro, Trailers, True story

In Claire in Motion, the titular character finds her orderly world turned upside down when her husband disappears. What follows – at least as far as the trailer goes – is a search that takes some unexpected twists and turns, and which further undermines Claire’s sense of her marriage and her life. Featuring a breakout performance from Breaking Bad‘s Betsy Brandt, Claire in Motion is the creation of writing and directing team Annie J. Howell and Lisa Robinson, and looks like a strong, compelling mix of mystery thriller and a woman’s emotional struggle to make sense of what’s happened, that takes a well-worn storyline and does something unexpected with it. Will the husband be missing out of choice, or will there be a more sinister reason for his disappearance? What looks certain is that the answer won’t be as straightforward as might be expected.

De Niro’s third movie of 2016 – after Dirty Grandpa and Hands of Stone – The Comedian sees him playing Jackie Burke, an aging comic who’s performance style is somewhat “confrontational”. A burgeoning relationship with Leslie Mann’s charity worker sets the character off on a journey of personal reassessment, but along the way he still finds time to be obnoxious and insulting – which isn’t surprising as his stand-up routines were written by Jeffrey Ross. The movie has had several ups and downs on its way to our screens (director Taylor Hackford was preceeded by Martin Scorsese, Sean Penn, and Mike Newell, while Mann was third choice after Kristen Wiig and Jennifer Aniston), so it remains to be seen if it can maintain a “straight face” away from the moments where Burke indulges in his penchant for derogatory remarks and non-PC attitude.

Based on a true tale of wartime heroism, The Zookeeper’s Wife tells the story of Antonina Zabinska and her husband Jan Zabinski (Jessica Chastain, Johan Heldenbergh) who not only saved hundreds of animals from the Warsaw Zoo – where they lived and worked – but also hundreds of people fleeing from Nazi persecution. It’s a movie with some arresting imagery (wild animals prowling the streets of ghetto-ised Warsaw), a script adapted from the book by Diane Ackerman (itself based on the unpublished diaries of Antonina Zabinska), and all overseen by Niki Caro, the director of Whale Rider (2002) and North Country (2005). It all looks promising enough then, and with Daniel Brühl’s Nazi officer no doubt making things difficult, it remains to be seen if the movie adopts a typically polished approach to the Zabinskis’ story, or aims to be more gritty and realistic.

Question of the Week – 23 November 2016

23 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

$10 billion, Box Office, Captain America: Civil War, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Question of the Week

First, the answer to the last Question of the Week from 13 November 2016: which of the five stars mentioned – John Goodman, Sandra Bullock, Bradley Cooper, Ryan Gosling, Kristen Wiig – didn’t appear in one of the following movies: Infamous (2006); Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011); Lullaby (2014); Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011); and The Midnight Meat Train (2008)?

The answer is Kristen Wiig, and she didn’t appear in Lullaby (2014).

This week’s Question of the Week is connected to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This year, the release of Captain America: Civil War saw Marvel pass the $10 billion mark in box office returns. It’s an amazing feat – based on just thirteen movies – and Doctor Strange‘s returns have already passed the $500,000 mark, so there’s no sign of their success slowing down, or being curtailed, any time soon. With that in mind, this week’s Question of the Week is:

Could another studio ever achieve the same level of success as Marvel is currently enjoying?

NOTE: This will be the last Question of the Week for the foreseeable future. It’s making way for the return of Poster of the Week.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (2016)

22 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Adam Devine, Anna Kendrick, Aubrey Plaza, Brothers, Comedy, Craigslist, Hawaii, Jake Szymanski, Review, True story, Wedding, Zac Efron

D: Jake Szymanski / 98m

Cast: Zac Efron, Anna Kendrick, Adam Devine, Aubrey Plaza, Stephen Root, Stephanie Faracy, Sugar Lyn Beard, Sam Richardson, Alice Wetterlund, Mary Holland, Kumail Nanjiani, Jake Johnson

The Stangle brothers – Mike (Devine) and Dave (Efron) – are party animals who consistently disrupt and ruin any and all family occasions. Their parents (Root, Faracy) are fed up with their antics and provide them with an ultimatum: for their sister, Jeanie’s (Beard) upcoming wedding in Hawaii, the brothers have to bring dates with them, dates who will stop them from trying to impress all the single women there and causing chaos in the process. For two young men in their twenties, finding “nice girls” proves to be a bit of a challenge. So what’s the obvious answer? Easy – put an advert on Craigslist offering an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii for the two lucky women who are suitable companions.

Unsurprisingly, the vetting process isn’t as speedy as the brothers would like, and it’s not until they go on The Wendy Williams Show that best friends and equally riotous party girls Alice (Kendrick) and Tatiana (Plaza) take an interest in the offer, and decide that they are the perfect candidates for the “job”. They meet Mike and Dave, pretend to be a hedge fund manager and teacher respectively, and find that their machinations have done the trick: they’re off to Hawaii.

The brothers’ parents, and everyone else for that matter, are impressed with their choice of partners. But as the stay continues, Alice and Tatiana’s true characters begin to express themselves. Tatiana refuses to have anything to do with a clearly infatuated Mike, while Alice begins a tentative relationship with Dave. They do their best to have a good time, while Mike and Dave do their best to behave themselves. But an unscheduled quad biking trip through Jurassic Park country finds Jeanie the victim of Mike’s carelessness, and suffering facial injuries that threaten her wedding day. Add to the mix a conniving cousin (Wetterlund), a massage therapist (Nanjiani) with a very “personal” touch, a groom considered by the bride to be boring, and increasing divisions between Mike and Dave, and there’s very little chance that their sister’s wedding is going to go ahead as planned. Far from it, in fact…

By now we should be used to the idea that women can be just as non-PC and crude as their male counterparts, and it’s an idea that Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates clings onto with all its might. In fact, it clings onto the idea as if it were the only idea it could have. Even when it becomes clear that Alice and Dave are falling in love – and therefore it’s only a matter of time before the same happens to Tatiana and Mike – the movie wants to have its cake and eat it by trying to convince the audience that any redemption will be short-lived. But we’ve all been here way too many times for such a clumsy notion to work, and by the movie’s end, Mike and Dave and Alice and Tatiana are no longer the rough diamonds we’ve been encouraged to cheer on from the start, but polished individuals with an improved sense of propriety, and heading for a life of domesticated bliss.

It’s a well-worn road to Damascus that these characters take, and that familiarity breeds an acceptance that the script, by Andrew Jay Cohen and Brendan O’Brien, won’t try to do anything different in its closing stages. With examples of gross-out humour proving unforthcoming, the movie falls back on a handful (literally, in one scene) of sex jokes, and a short sequence where Alice and Jeanie get high on E’s. Elsewhere, Devine yells and shouts and makes agonised faces, while Efron adopts a strained, perpexed expression throughout, as if he’s read the script, passed on it, and is completely amazed that he’s actually making the movie after all. And Kendrick does what Kendrick does, not best, but all the time: plays Alice in the same perky, quirky way she plays all her other roles, from Martha in Mr. Right (2015) to Dana in The Accountant (2016). (Is there no beginning to her talent as an actress?)

Thankfully, there’s respite from all the stillborn humour and desperate attempts to instill laughter, and it comes in the form of Aubrey Plaza. Plaza has an uncanny ability to appear bored and engaged at the same time, and this apparent displacement allows her to give a performance that keeps the viewer on their toes; you’re never sure just what she’s going to say or do next. All you can be sure of is that the combination of her expressions and the way she delivers her dialogue won’t be as telegraphed or predictable as that of her co-stars. Plaza isn’t afraid to take risks in her performances, and it’s this that makes her so interesting to watch.

With the movie proving entirely lacklustre, and relying on the kind of contrived set ups so familiar from a dozen or more similar movies – it even references Wedding Crashers (2005), a movie that makes this movie look like it was put together by people who haven’t actually seen Wedding Crashers – all the viewer can do is hope that it’ll all be over sooner rather than later. In the director’s chair, Szymanski makes his feature debut after years of writing and directing video shorts with titles such as Bat Fight With Will Ferrell and Denise Richards’ Funbags (both 2009), and makes a decent enough fist of things but can’t make it all flow together in a way that would make it more palatable. And with the performances being so wayward – Efron seems to be in a different movie from everyone else (maybe he was still wishing he was), Wetterlund sets back the cause of credible lesbian performances by about a thousand years – it’s a movie that doesn’t even do justice to its Hawaiian locations.

Rating: 4/10 – despite being based on a true story (two brothers really did advertise for wedding dates on Craigslist), Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates takes the basic idea and doesn’t come up with anything it can run with; unfunny for long stretches, the movie lurches from one dispiriting confrontation to another without ever stopping to think if what it’s doing is actually working – which it isn’t.

Mini-Review: Deepwater Horizon (2016)

21 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

BP, Disaster, Drama, Gina Rodriguez, Gulf of Mexico, John Malkovich, Kate Hudson, Kurt Russell, Mark Wahlberg, Mike Williams, Oil rig, Peter Berg, Review, Thriller, True story

D: Peter Berg / 107m

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, John Malkovich, Gina Rodriguez, Kate Hudson, Ethan Suplee, Dylan O’Brien

Arriving at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig site in the Gulf of Mexico to learn that certain safety checks haven’t been carried out, general operational supervisor “Mr Jimmy” Harrell (Russell) and chief electrical engineer Mike Williams (Wahlberg) find themselves at odds with BP executive Donald Vidrine (Malkovich) who is advocating that drilling continue despite the absence of these checks. With many more of the crew of the rig expressing their concerns, Vidrine pulls rank and the drilling resumes. Pressure begins to build in the pipeline, and further signs point to a dramatic, and likely, system failure. When it does, a massive blowout ensues, and the resulting explosion causes tremendous damage to the rig, threatening the lives of everyone on it.

As fires rage all around them, the workers’ attempt to evacuate the rig. Williams finds himself rescuing several of his colleagues, including “Mr Jimmy” who has been badly injured. With the Coast Guard racing to the rescue, and with no guarantee that the fires won’t cause the rig to sink, Williams et al must rely on their own ingenuity in order to get to safety, while the world looks on at what will become the worst environmental disaster in US history.

Watching Deepwater Horizon‘s first forty minutes, with its depictions of bubbling air pockets within the drill shaft, and the pipe itself shifting in protest against the pressure being exerted on it, it’s not hard to find a degree of anxiety about what’s going to happen creep up on you. It’s during this stretch that director Berg, aided by editors Gabriel Fleming and Colby Parker Jr, ratchets up the tension as he sets the scene for what we all know will be a nightmarish tale of survival. He also does a good job of introducing the main characters – along with principal supporting character, “Mr Jimmy”‘s moustache – and making us care about them. But once the oil hits the fan and fire takes a hold of the rig, the movie takes a strange left turn and becomes a standard men-in-peril movie where it’s hard to distinguish who’s doing what, where and how.

Inevitably, the movie regales us with moments of sacrifice, heroism and incredible fortitude, but it also features various stock elements, such as Hudson’s anxious wife stuck at home watching it all unfold on TV, and Malkovich’s suitably oleaginous BP executive looking sheepish as he gets in a lifeboat. While it’s easy to see why Berg has included these moments, it’s the way in which they help dissipate the tension established earlier on that proves problematical. It’s equally unhelpful that despite all the pyrotechnics and practical effects on display, Deepwater Horizon feels at times like an extreme, sea-based version of The Towering Inferno (1974). It makes for a distracting viewing experience (even if it wasn’t Berg’s intention). That said, the performances are uniformly good (though Malkovich’s accent is distracting), and the script manages to avoid too much foreshadowing (e.g. “I can’t wait to get home and see my newborn child”, from someone who’s clearly going to snuff it).

Rating: 7/10 – curiously uninvolving once things go from bad to staggeringly worse, Deepwater Horizon is a visually impressive retelling of an incident that BP would probably like to forget about completely; but spectacle without a human element to guide us through it is just that, spectacle, and the movie never finds an answer to the way in which it shifts down a gear after such an effective opening.

Top 10 Actresses at the Box Office 2016

20 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

2016, Actresses, Box Office, Highest grossing movie, Movies, Top 10

As with the list of the Top 10 Actors at the Box Office 2016, this was meant to be posted back in September, but with some wholly expected box office successes this year it seemed prudent to wait to see if these successes had any effect on the list as a whole. As it turns out, there were quite a few changes to the list from last year, with only one actress not returning, and several of the other actresses on the list leap-frogging all over the place. So much so, in fact, that it’ll be even more interesting to see who’s on the list next year – and where.

NOTE: HGM stands for Highest Grossing Movie, and the figures represent the worldwide gross. And all figures are courtesy of boxofficemojo.com.

10 – Jennifer Lawrence / HGM: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013) – $865,011,746

Replacing Sigourney Weaver on the list, Lawrence trades on her role as Katniss Everdeen to make the Top 10, but whether or not she stays here is another matter, as the likelihood of her making any more movies in her other franchise, the X-Men series, are dwindling thanks to the poor reception given to X-Men: Apocalypse (2016). With nothing too blockbuster-like on the horizon, expect Lawrence to be absent from the list come this time next year.

9 – Anne Hathaway / HGM: The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – $1,084,939,099

The Christopher Nolan effect keeps Hathaway in ninth place, and while her return to the role of the White Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016) has helped her cause, she may yet be a casualty come next year’s list, as the only potential money spinner ahead of her is the all-female Ocean’s Eleven reboot – and that’s not due until 2018.

8 – Sandra Bullock / HGM: Minions (2015) – $1,159,398,397

Down one place from last year, Bullock is becoming less and less of a presence on our screens, and right now, won’t be seen until 2018 with Anne Hathaway in the Ocean’s Eleven reboot. Potentially then, Bullock may drop down (or be completely out of) the list come 2017, but even if she is, chances are she won’t be in that position for long, though again, right now, nothing can be relied upon.

7 – Emma Watson / HGM: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (2011) – $1,341,511,219

Down three places from last year’s number four, Watson’s post-Harry Potter career continues to be sporadic, yet interesting for the choices she’s made, but it’s clear that she’s unlikely to feature in another box office juggernaut like the Harry Potter franchise anytime soon. Whether or not she’ll maintain her position next year is uncertain at this point, but she should still be with us – somewhere on the list – but what is certain is that a return to the top five isn’t on the cards.

6 – Elizabeth Banks / HGM: Spider-Man 3 (2007) – $890,871,626

Firstly, an apology to Elizabeth Banks and any of her fans who felt that The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013) couldn’t be her HGM; you were absolutely right. Due to an oversight, and the way in which boxofficemojo.com only regards starring roles in their deliberations, Banks’ appearance as Miss Brant, J. Jonah Jameson’s secretary, wasn’t given its box office due in last year’s list, so it’s only right that amends are made here and now. And she’s moved up two places from last year’s number eight, which is like icing on the cake.

5 – Julia Roberts / HGM: Pretty Woman (1990) – $463,406,268

Another non-mover, Roberts’ HGM is the only movie on either list – Actor or Actress – that has a box office take of less than $500,000, proof that the actress has made some astute choices throughout her career, even if some of them recently have felt a little underwhelming – Secret in Their Eyes (2015) and Mother’s Day (2016) in particular. But she’ll remain on the list for a while to come it seems, though she only has next year’s Wonder wrapped and almost ready to go, which could mean a lower ranking come 2017’s list.

4 – Cate Blanchett / HGM: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) – $1,119,929,521

Last year’s number two drops two places, but with outings in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – Thor: Ragnarok (2017) – and that darned Ocean’s Eleven reboot still to come, it’s likely that Blanchett will find herself climbing back up the list in the next couple of years. If she does she’ll be the first person on either list to reverse a downward trend… and you wouldn’t write off that possibility, now, would you?

3 – Helena Bonham Carter / HGM: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (2011) – $1,341,511,219

The last non-mover on the list, Bonham Carter’s place is assured thanks to her roles in Cinderella (2015) and Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016). These should keep her in the top five for now, but where, say, Emma Watson’s place in the Top 10 seemed assured, Bonham Carter may find herself slipping down the list come next year, as the majority of her upcoming projects look unlikely to boost her box office returns.

2 – Cameron Diaz / HGM: Shrek 2 (2004) – $919,838,758

After two years at the top, Diaz drops to second place. With no projects in the works and her last movie having been Annie (2014), it’s likely that Diaz will find herself slipping even further down the list as time goes on and some of her fellow actresses align themselves with blockbusters and franchise money-grabbers. Of course, this isn’t Diaz’s fault, but it would be a shame if she decided to continue to cut back so drastically on acting as she seems to have done since 2014.

1 – Scarlett Johansson / HGM: The Avengers (2012) – $1,518,812,988

To borrow a line from Russell Mulcahy’s Highlander (1986): “There can be only one.” On the 2014 list, Johansson was in ninth place; last year she’d jumped to sixth. Now she’s sitting head and shoulders above everyone else in the top spot and all thanks to a certain black leather-clad assassin she’s played five times now. She’s unlikely to be dethroned anytime soon, but if she is it’s unlikely that it’ll be anyone on this current list (unless they can rack up an overall box office success that amounts to over $8.5 billion).

Top 10 Actors at the Box Office 2016

20 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

2016, Actors, Box Office, Highest grossing movie, Movies, Top 10

Welcome to this year’s look at the great and good amongst movie actors (for the actresses, click here), those stars who keep us coming back to the cinema time after time, and help put as many bums on seats as they possibly can. As with last year’s list, I was going to do this post back in September, but wanted to wait and see if there were any surprising outcomes at the 2016 box office that might lead to some major changes to last year’s list. As it turns out there wasn’t, though we have lost Gary Oldman from the list, but overall it seems as if this is a year for positions and box office returns to keep the rest of the Top 10 in a kind of holding pattern, even if there’s a bit of shoving and pushing when it comes to the actual rankings.

NOTE: HGM stands for Highest Grossing Movie, and the figures represent the worldwide gross. And all figures are courtesy of boxofficemojo.com.

10 – Michael Caine / HGM: The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – $1,084,939,099

Down one place from last year’s number nine, Caine holds onto his place in the list thanks to his involvement in the Dark Knight trilogy. That those movies did so well at the box office is a testament to the visionary talents of Christopher Nolan, but the role of Alfred has probably never been portrayed as effectively as Caine did it. It was doubtful he’d remain on the list this year, but he’s held on. Again, though, it’s still unlikely he’ll be here this time next year.

9 – Johnny Depp / HGM: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) – $1,066,179,725

Also down one place from last year, Depp has the potential to be higher up the list next year if the latest, potentially overblown Captain Jack Sparrow-fest, Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge, is successful enough. If not, Depp will still be on the list in 2017, and again probably higher up, thanks to his involvement in the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them franchise.

8 – Anthony Daniels / HGM: Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) – $2,068,223,624

This year’s newbie, Daniels has made it into the Top 10 by virtue of appearing as C-3PO in every one of the Star Wars movies so far – and not to mention the same role in The Lego Movie (2014) – so his inclusion could be construed as “just waiting to happen”. With two more movies to come in the third trilogy, Daniels’ place on the list is assured for some time to come, and he has the potential to be much higher in the list come 2018.

7 – Tom Cruise / HGM: Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011) – $694,713,380

Down one from last year, Cruise’s HGM has made the least amount of money of all the movies on the list, but thanks to his solid, dependable presence at the box office, he retains his mid-place ranking. His upcoming movies include Universal’s update of The Mummy (2017), and at some stage, Top Gun 2. Whether these will be enough to keep him on the list remains to be seen, but if you want to make a wager on who’ll be gone this time next year, the Cruiser isn’t such a bad outside bet.

6 – Eddie Murphy / HGM: Shrek 2 (2004) – $919,838,758

Another drop of one place, this time for possibly the least likely actor to be included in the list, and to remain in roughly the same position for three years running now. Murphy’s continued presence seems to be in spite of his recent movie choices – which have been so few as to mean just one movie in particular, Mr. Church (2016) – but if it gives thedullwoodexperiment another excuse to include a picture of Donkey then that’s absolutely fine.

5 – Robert Downey Jr / HGM: The Avengers (2012) – $1,518,812,988

Downey Jr continues to ascend the list, moving up two places from last year’s number seven (and which was three places up from his spot in the 2014 list), and does so thanks to his co-starring role in Captain America: Civil War (2016). With at least two more Marvel appearances to come, as well as a third Sherlock Holmes movie in 2018, the acting capstone of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is definitely here to stay.

4 – Morgan Freeman / HGM: The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – $1,084,939,099

Down one place from last year, Freeman remains in the top five thanks to Christopher Nolan and the Dark Knight trilogy. Amazingly, the likes of Momentum (2015) and the ill-advised remake of Ben-Hur (2016), haven’t seriously damaged his chances of staying on the list, and it’s entirely probable that come next year he’ll still be placed around the midway mark.

3 – Tom Hanks / HGM: Toy Story 3 (2010) – $1,066,969,703

Slipping down another place after being in 2014’s top slot, Hanks is still an actor whose presence on the list is almost required. But the Toy Story sequel is still in the works, though not due until 2019, and after next year’s The Circle, Hanks has nothing else lined up. That can’t possibly stay the same, but even if it does, Hanks is unlikely to ever drop so far down the list that he’ll drop out altogether.

2 – Samuel L. Jackson / HGM: The Avengers (2012) – $1,518, 812,988

A brief stay at the top for Jackson, but as with anyone in the top three, he’s not going anywhere anytime soon. Like Downey Jr, he’s got more Marvel time coming up, and he’s still landing roles in box office successes such as Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children ($259,862,899 and counting), so it’s not just the MCU that’s keeping him here. But once Avengers: Infinity War (2018) is released, expect him to reclaim his place at the top of the list…

1 – Harrison Ford / HGM: Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) – $2,068,223,624

…because Harrison Ford can’t make any more Star Wars movies. The seventh outing for the Force and all its adherents has, unsurprisingly, pushed Ford up three places from number four and into the top spot before you can shout, “Look out, Han, he’s got a lightsabre!” But while it’s likely that Samuel L. Jackson will supersede him at some point (though probably not until 2018), it’s good to see the top spot change hands again, and to see franchise veteran Ford sitting (fairly) pretty on top.

Happy Birthday – 19 November

19 Saturday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

19 November, Actresses, Allison Janney, Black Robe, Hairspray, Happy Birthday, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Jodie Foster, Kathleen Quinlan, Meg Ryan, Nim's Island, Sandrine Holt, The Doors

Usually, the Happy Birthday post features one actor or actress and focuses on five of their movies that may have passed people by, or maybe don’t get the recognition they deserve. And today was going to see one of those posts hit thedullwoodexperiment, but when I looked more closely, it became impossible to choose just one actress from the following five, all of whom were born today. So, in recognition of the sheer versatility these incredible women embody, here’s just one movie from each of them (the usual rules apply).

Jodie Foster (19 November 1962 -)

Nim’s Island (2008) – Character: Alexandra Rover

Foster portrays an author whose agoraphobic nature is challenged when a young girl, Nim (played by Abigail Breslin), needs help after a storm ravages the island she lives on. Alexandra’s nervous, pedantic nature is brought to vivid life by Foster in a role that calls for a great deal of comedy – not something Foster has attempted too often in her career, and certainly not as an adult. But she gives one of her most enjoyable and suitably “loose” performances, and the movie as a whole is one that you can appreciate time and time again.

Sandrine Holt (19 November 1972 -)

Black Robe (1991) – Character: Annuka

Although best known for TV roles in series as diverse as House of Cards and 24, Holt has made some interesting movie choices over the years, but none more so than Black Robe, an absorbing and compelling story set amongst the Indian tribes in Canada in the 17th century. Holt is the chief’s daughter who falls in love with a Jesuit priest’s companion, and her performance is impressive for a feature debut, her youth helping to belie the ease with which she inhabits the part and expresses both the character’s uncertainty in love and her sense of honour to her tribe.

Allison Janney (19 November 1959 -)

Hairspray (2007) – Character: Prudy Pingleton

Rarely the lead in a movie, Janney has fashioned a solid, and wide-ranging, career as an actress you can rely on to nail a supporting role with accomplished ease. Such is the case in Hairspray, playing the ultra-conservative mother of Amanda Bynes’ “checkerboard chick”. Janney is magnificently vile as Prudy, the character’s right-wing religious attitudes allowing Janney lines of dialogue that she can sink her teeth into and deliver with just the right amount of blinkered vitriol; lines like, “You see? You see! If I let you leave the house right now, you’d be in prison, fighting whores for cigarettes.”

Kathleen Quinlan (19 November 1954 -)

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977) – Character: Deborah Blake

One of Quinlan’s earliest roles, what is impressive is that she’s playing a sixteen year old whose immersion in a childhood fantasy world has continued as she’s gotten older. Now in a mental institution and under the care of a sympathetic doctor (played by Bibi Andersson), Quinlan’s character begins to come to terms with reality, and does so in a way that’s heartfelt and powerful to watch. Quinlan was nominated for a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Deborah, and when you see the movie you realise what a shame it’s been that her career didn’t climb the heights it so clearly could have done.

Meg Ryan (19 November 1961 -)

The Doors (1991) – Character: Pamela Courson

As the combination muse/girlfriend/ornament of The Doors’ lead singer Jim Morrison (played here by Val Kilmer), Ryan holds her own in a movie that has more than its fair share of testosterone flying around. Courson was ultimately a tragic figure, and Ryan deftly and intuitively highlights the emotional instability that was triggered by Morrison’s treatment of her. Easily one of Ryan’s best roles, and one that serves as a reminder that romantic comedies don’t have to define her career, it’s worth seeing just for “the dead duck” scene alone.

Cardboard Boxer (2016)

18 Friday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Boyd Holbrook, Diary, Drama, Fighting, Homelessness, Knate Lee, Review, Terrence Howard, Thomas Haden Church

D: Knate Lee / 88m

Cast: Thomas Haden Church, Terrence Howard, Boyd Holbrook, Rhys Wakefield, Zach Villa, William Stanford Davies, Macy Gray, Carlton Byrd, David Henrie, Conrad Roberts, Adam Clark

Willie (Church) is a homeless man who sleeps in a cardboard box at night, and who wanders the streets by day looking for food wherever he can find it (even if it’s not exactly fresh), and hoping to score money from passersby. He lives a lonely existence, keeping himself to himself and spending a considerable amount of his “downtime” on a rooftop that affords him a panoramic view of the city where he lives. Down at ground level, home is a place on a back street with a group of other homeless people.

Willie doesn’t engage with other people. He keeps himself to himself, and tries not to get in anybody else’s way, including a local man (Clark) who carries a skillet and threatens to hurt anyone in the homeless group who aggravates him. Fortunately, while his approach to the group is antagonistic, there’s a taxi driver everyone calls The Pope (Howard) who is supportive; he provides blankets and food when he can. Willie and The Pope have a grudging respect for each other, but there are also clear boundaries that The Pope keeps in place.

One day, Willie finds a little girl’s diary in a rubbish container. It’s burnt around the edges, like the other stuff there, but curious, he begins to read it. He learns at the beginning that the little girl has started the diary after her mother has died. Finding himself affected by her story he attempts to continue reading it, but is defeated by its being in cursive (basically joined-up writing). He begins to ask others in the homeless group if they’ll read it for him but he’s rebuffed at every turn. It’s not until he helps a war veteran, a man named Pinky (Holbrook), that he finds someone willing to read the rest of the diary to him (though he does learn to read cursive as well).

Some time later, two young men, JJ (Wakefield) and Tyler (Villa), appear in the homeless group’s back street and, for fun, challenge skillet man to fight someone for fifty dollars. Willie just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and is attacked by skillet man. However, Willie defends himself and beats the man unconscious. JJ is impressed, and starts calling Willie his friend, something that makes Willie proud and self-conscious at the same time. But JJ has an ulterior motive: using Willie to curry favour with his friends, he persuades him to fight other homeless men for money while he makes even more money via side betting. But things begin to get out of hand when skillet man makes a return appearance…

If there’s one thing that tales of the down-and-out and the dispossessed always do, is to inform the viewer just why the main character(s) are down-and-out or dispossessed. It’s like a courtesy feature. Here’s a man (or a woman) who’s down on their luck, and here’s the reason why. Except in Cardboard Boxer, the viewer has to make his or her own mind up about why Willie is homeless, and it’s not an easy thing to decipher, because writer/director Knate Lee isn’t about to tell you. That said, it’s not too diffcult, given Willie’s skill as a fighter – well, brawler might be a better term – that his slow-witted nature could have been caused by one too many blows to the head, but even that interpretation lacks confirmation. Here, Willie is extra handy with his fists, and that’s all you need to know.

Except it really isn’t. Willie isn’t exactly an ordinary character, despite his doing ordinary stuff and trying to fit in as an ordinary human being, his emotional attachment to a war veteran whose legs are missing below each knee, and a little girl whose name he doesn’t even know show a need to connect, and it surprises him as much as it does us. But as he works his way through the diary, and begins to express his need for human contact, Willie doesn’t become any more sympathetic, or any more likeable. This is someone who’ll batter a fellow homeless person for money and the apparent “respect” of a young man well over twenty years his junior. And he’s not looking to find a way out of his “predicament”. Instead, and despite sums of money coming his way that could begin to make a difference, Willie shows no sign of wanting to improve his life, even when he has enough money to do so. Sure, he rents a hotel room and takes a shower and eats snacks while watching TV, but this is literally the best that he can come up with. His life literally doesn’t get any better than that.

And so, the movie falls back on the little girl’s diary, with Knate Lee’s script painting a picture of abuse and despair that compliments Willie’s own life – or at least it would do if we ever knew what caused his fall through the cracks of society in the first place. In the end, Lee’s script is a bleak portrait of a disconnected man’s empty life and his belated attempts to give it meaning, even if his methods – fighting for money, treating his fellow down-and-outs with disrespect, latching onto a possibly dead girl’s memory – aren’t exactly forgivable. It all makes for a dour, miserable movie that relies too heavily on Church’s distracted, almost there performance, and which features way too many shots of Willie standing on his favourite rooftop, or on a street corner, or just trudging round the city aimlessly. His life lacks purpose, but that’s an easy call; unfortunately, writer/director Lee feels the need to remind us of this constantly. Take away all those “blank stare” moments and the movie would run at least twenty minutes shorter.

Despite being on board as an executive producer, Church’s involvement doesn’t do anything to elevate or improve the material, and he does little to convince the viewer that there’s an interior life going on behind the placid-featured façade he adopts for the most part. Howard is stuck with a supporting role that probably didn’t require him to be on set for more than a few days, while Holbrook’s turn as the disabled war veteran Pinky is yet another in a long line of indistinguishable disabled roles that movie makers believe audiences still have a lot of time for. And as for Wakefield, well, JJ is a caricature role that follows a predictable arc that’s married to a predictable portrayal.

The movie has been shot in a nondescript, visually unappealing style by Peter Holland that is no doubt meant to be a reflection of the lack of glamour inherent in Willie’s life, but it’s too obvious a choice and feels like a better effort couldn’t be decided on or made. And under Lee’s guidance, Jeff Seibenick’s editing leaves several scenes feeling as if there should be more to them, or in a weird contradiction, that they should be shorter and more punchy – but the material won’t allow it. This is Lee’s feature debut, and it shows, the choices he makes as a director showing a lack of imagination and confidence. And this is borne out by the movie’s conclusion, a fairytale ending that is both unnecessarily mawkish and dramatically inept given what’s gone before. But at least it’s not as downbeat as the rest of the movie.

Rating: 4/10 – a lumbering attempt to find grace and purpose even amongst homeless people, Cardboard Boxer lacks depth and a sense of purpose, and a central character the audience can get behind; while it merrily (and that’s still not the best word) goes about telling its largely redundant, determinedly non-complex tale, viewers will be wondering when and if the movie’s ever going to grow and stretch into something more affecting and worthwhile.

//ws-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=GB&source=ss&ref=as_ss_li_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=thedullwoodex-21&marketplace=amazon&region=GB&placement=B01KWN1ZOE&asins=B01KWN1ZOE&linkId=d46234aee881214ec33cc823ecd6f62b&show_border=true&link_opens_in_new_window=true

Jenny’s Wedding (2015)

17 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Comedy, Drama, Gay marriage, Grace Gummer, Katherine Heigl, Lesbian, Linda Emond, Mary Agnes Donoghue, Relationships, Review, Tom Wilkinson

D: Mary Agnes Donoghue / 91m

Cast: Katherine Heigl, Tom Wilkinson, Linda Emond, Grace Gummer, Alexis Bledel, Sam McMurray, Diana Hardcastle, Matthew Metzger, Houston Rhines

Jenny Farrell (Heigl) is the eldest daughter of fireman Eddie (Wilkinson) and housewife Rose (Emond). She works at placing foster kids and orphans in suitable homes, is well liked and admired by everyone around her – except maybe her younger sister, Anne (Gummer) – and is in a lesbian relationship with her (ostensible) flatmate, Kitty (Bledel). Jenny has never come out to her family because she doesn’t think they’d be able to handle it. Of course, this means she’s lied to them for a number of years now, and as with all lies that are prolonged beyond any possible good they may have done in the first place, Jenny has at least understood that if she tells them, they’ll be hurt and disappointed. But a conversation with her father about marriage and having children and all the responsibility that comes with it, leads Jenny to realise that that’s what she wants: to be married and have kids too.

So, now she needs to own up about her sexuality, and try and do so in a way that won’t upset everyone. She tells her mother first, but Rose is upset; not for herself per se, but for the knock her standing in the local community will take if everyone else was to know. She makes Jenny promise not to tell anyone else except her father, and not even Anne. Not wanting to upset her mother further, Jenny agrees. She tells her dad and while he’s shocked at not having realised after all this time, he’s initially much more supportive than Rose, though he goes along with her wishes.

Jenny and Kitty begin to plan their wedding. While they do so, Eddie and Rose struggle with the knowledge that Jenny has lied to them, and that they don’t know how to react. The relationships between the three of them begin to unravel, and are thrown into even more chaos when Anne sees her sister and Kitty kissing in a bridal store. When she learns that her parents have known about Jenny being a lesbian, and haven’t told her, Anne is devastated. But it does make her begin to question her marriage to layabout Frankie (Rhines), and the reason their front lawn isn’t green (don’t worry, it does makes sense within the movie). Things reach boiling point, though, at a funeral for a friend and neighbour where a confrontation between her father and Jenny leads to them becoming estranged. As the big day approaches, loyalties are challenged, relationships are tested, and prejudices appear set to interfere with, and derail, Jenny’s happiness.

Okay, let’s get the obvious out of the way, right at the start: this is not a good movie. Jenny’s Wedding is tired, predictable, asinine in places, dramatically inert for most of its running time, features another performance from Heigl that makes you wonder how she’s still getting lead roles, and looks and sounds like a Bible reader for those who find lesbianism distasteful. It’s a movie that suffers from trite dialogue, an unconvincing scenario, poorly realised motivations, and some extremely dodgy sexual politics. It tries hard not to be offensive, but fails every time it tries to make Eddie and Rose’s feelings “acceptable” in terms of their characters. Not even Tom Wilkinson, an actor who can inject genuine feeling and credibility into (almost) every role he plays, is stymied here by a script – courtesy of Donoghue – that asks him to either spout platitudes or inanities as a matter of course, and hunch over as if the weight of the world (or the movie’s ineptitude) was on his shoulders.

But there is one area where the movie is interesting, and it’s one that’s far beyond any expectation of achievement you could have hoped for. While Donoghue piles agony after agony onto a much more deserving Jenny than she probably intended, the movie’s creator tells a much better story about the lies we tell and the reasons we tell them. Jenny lies from the start but puts the onus on her parents for doing so, an act of cowardice that should offset any sympathy we have for her. As the movie progresses, Jenny continues to justify her having lied to her family because she’s unable to trust them to be supportive, and then she acts all hurt and surprised when the amount of time she’s spent lying to them prompts the exact reaction she’s been afraid of. The movie actively punishes her for doing so, an act of retribution that’s far more effective than expected precisely because Jenny is the main character and the audience is – nominally at least – supposed to be on her side.

But Jenny’s parents are just as bad, and although it’s out of confusion, their lies are based around, first, their helplessness about how they feel, and second, about the repercussions they’re likely to experience amongst their friends (in Rose’s case) and colleagues (in Eddie’s case). They lie out of fear and mistrust of others, and it’s here that Donoghue unexpectedly provides the most interesting aspect of the movie as a whole: that daughter and parents are entirely alike. And yet when the inevitable last-minute reconciliation occurs between Jenny and Eddie (Rose comes around much sooner), this isn’t mentioned at all. Instead, Donoghue, clearly unaware of the connection she’s made through her own script, trots out a sorry tale of male emasculation for Eddie’s recalcitrance, and leaves Wilkinson looking embarrassed for having to explain it all.

There are lies and lying behaviour elsewhere in the movie. Anne’s husband Frankie is always going out on “business” late at night, a clear indication that he’s having an affair, and Rose’s friend, Ellen (Hardcastle), is the kind of hypocritical busybody who’ll take any piece of bad news and use it to her own ends, and embellish her own role at the same time. Her faux sympathy and understanding are a kind of insidious lying, and all the more unforgivable. Again, it’s this element of the movie, whether deliberately included or not, that gives it an edge that the so-called drama of Jenny getting her wedding day as wished for and planned doesn’t have (of course she’s going to get married and have kids – eventually; this is a fairy tale dressed up as a middling drama of expectations).

Like many other romantic dramas, Jenny’s Wedding could be seen as a comedy at heart, but while there are a handful of comic moments, this is a serious attempt at exploring… something. If it’s not readily clear then it doesn’t really impact on any enjoyment that can be had, and aside from the waste of Tom Wilkinson’s time and effort – it really is a stinker of a role – there’s Gummer’s performance to be appreciated, and odd moments where Emond also elevates things by sheer dint of effort. Otherwise, Donoghue struggles at maintaining a consistent tone, and avoids making anyone a bad guy, something that might have upped the drama and made it more interesting. She also marginalises the very relationship that Jenny is involved in, leaving Kitty in the background like an afterthought, and making it all about a self-absorbed coward and liar who wants it all her own way… and if you pay close attention, that attitude never changes.

Rating: 4/10 – some interesting aspects set around lying as a form of personal protection aside, Jenny’s Wedding lacks focus and a central character you can warm to; pedestrian in both its ideas and its presentation, it’s a movie that you’ll forget about soon after seeing it, and serves as another reminder that Heigl’s career is heading nowhere fast.

Blue Jay (2016)

16 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Alex Lehmann, Drama, Improvisation, Indie movie, Mark Duplass, Relationships, Review, Role play, Sarah Paulson

D: Alex Lehmann / 80m

Cast: Mark Duplass, Sarah Paulson, Clu Gulager

Having been living and working in Tucson for a while, Jim (Duplass) returns to his childhood home in California following the death of his mother. He’s in the process of going through the house and clearing it when a trip to the local supermarket finds him bumping into Amanda (Paulson), his teenage sweetheart. She’s in town visiting her sister who’s having a baby. At first, their meeting up is awkward and their attempts at conversation are stilted. They part, but outside in the parking lot, Jim asks Amanda if she’d like to go get a coffee. She agrees, and they head for the nearby Blue Jay diner.

There they begin to catch up properly. Jim reveals that he’s been doing dry wall work with his uncle in Tucson, and is thinking of doing up his mother’s house and selling it, while Amanda speaks of her marriage to Chris, and finding herself a mother to his two kids when they got married. Both tell each other their lives are good, but it’s clear that Jim isn’t as happy as Amanda appears to be. From the diner they go to a store they used to frequent as teenagers, and where the owner, Waynie (Gulager), still remembers them after twenty-two years. From there they venture to a spot near the river where they used to go. There, Jim reveals that he doesn’t have a job at the moment due to a falling out with his uncle, and that he doesn’t have a clue what he’s going to do next.

Amanda tells him she wants to see his mother’s house. When they get there, Amanda is astonished by the amount of stuff that’s still there from the time they were together: from mixtapes to photos to notebooks and letters, and one unopened letter in particular that’s addressed to her, and which she hides in her coat pocket. Jim digs out an old cassette player and they listen to recordings they made, and one where they were pretending to be an old married couple celebrating their fortieth wedding anniversary. They reminisce further, and decide to recreate that fictitious anniversary through having a meal together. As the evening wears on, both Jim and Amanda begin to grow closer, until it seems that their past will overshadow the present…

Although there are several moments in Blue Jay where Mark Duplass’s “script” seems hellbent on striking a pose for lost love, and its reclamation, it’s thanks to said “script” being an outline around which both Duplass and Paulson have improvised their dialogue, that it avoids this likely pitfall, and in doing so makes Jim and Amanda’s predicament all the more credible. Make no mistake, the relationship and the conversations that occur in the movie, could only happen in a movie, and though this level of artifice has all the potential of feeling flat and awkward to watch, it’s a mark of the commitment and the intelligence of its two stars that Blue Jay never once feels forced or uncomfortably set up.

However, this is an ex-couple who have secrets to reveal, and it’s the way in which these secrets are held at bay until the last ten minutes that is worrisome in terms of what goes before. At first, and despite their initial awkwardness with each other, Jim and Amanda appear to pick up from where they have left off over twenty years ago, and even though we don’t know the reason they split up, there aren’t any signs that it was contentious on either side, or that it’s left them embittered with each other. They’re open and (mostly) honest with each other, and they’re clearly enjoying being together again after such a long time. As well, both Duplass and Paulson seem at ease with each other as actors, and they have a confidence in each other’s abilities that helps the story and their characters along.

Back at Jim’s mother’s house – or his boyhood home, though it’s interesting that it’s rarely referred to as that – further reminders of the past spark what can only be described as an unsettling game of role playing. Watching these two ex-lovers play at being a couple celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary, is an odd, worrisome turn of events that prompts the question, why would they do that? Or, why would they feel the need to revisit the games of their youth in that particular way? Are they that unhappy with their lives now? The answers to those questions remain unanswered for the most part, with only hints and clues dropped at random in the conversations that follow, but what is clear is that there’s a longing for some kind of connection that they don’t have with anyone else. Maybe the role playing facilitates that, and brings them back to the people, the couple, they once were. Maybe that period was their relationship peak.

You can interpret their actions in many different ways, and the likelihood would be that no one interpretation would be completely wrong or completely right. Duplass and Lehmann (making his feature debut), don’t appear to want the movie to be that black and white (and despite it being shot in that format), but once the reason for their split is revealed it has such a jarring effect that it’s a bit like being slapped in the face. And it has the unfortunate effect of calling into question everything that’s gone before, and the ease with which these two have reconnected. Would their running into each other really have led to coffee and jelly beans and dinner and head rubs? Wouldn’t the wedge that drove them apart still be there, and as it happens, especially on Jim’s side?

In the real world, absolutely (it’s a very big wedge). But again this is a movie, and though we can allow some suspension of disbelief, and admire the consistency of tone and purpose that’s been achieved, the movie is derailed by its revelation; and by the scene that follows, which aims for some degree of closure, but ends up looking and sounding incomplete, the one time in the movie where Duplass, Paulson and Lehmann have decided that what they’ve got is just enough (or perhaps worse still, will have to do). In the end, it upsets the rhythms established earlier in the movie, and leaves the viewer feeling that they’ve been tricked into having to accept an ending that doesn’t match what’s gone before.

Rating: 8/10 – despite it’s unsatisfactory denouement, Blue Jay has much to recommend it, and Duplass and Paulson should be congratulated for maintaining the truth of their characters through improvisation and intuition; Lehmann’s shiny black and white photography enhances the sense of nostalgia the movie revels in, and its quiet, brooding nature is a perfect fit for the way in which the characters move around each other.

Nocturnal Animals (2016)

16 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Amy Adams, Art gallery, Drama, Ex-husband, Isla Fisher, Jake Gyllenhaal, Literary adaptation, Michael Shannon, Murder, Novel, Review, Thriller, Tom Ford

D: Tom Ford / 117m

Cast: Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Isla Fisher, Ellie Bamber, Armie Hammer, Karl Glusman, Robert Aramayo, Laura Linney, Andrea Riseborough, Michael Sheen, India Menuez, Graham Beckel, Jena Malone

Back in 2009, Tom Ford, once the creative director at Gucci between 1994 and 2004, made a movie called A Single Man. He produced it, he wrote it, and he directed it. In the process, he ensured Colin Firth received his first Oscar nomination as the single man of the title, a grief-stricken English professor who finds it difficult to deal with the death of his partner. It won a shedload of awards, and Ford was heralded as an exciting new voice in contemporary cinema. But even in amongst the sterling notices, reviewers and critics were largely in agreement: Firth’s performance saved the movie from being an empty exercise in style over content. Now, seven years later, he’s back with another adaptation, this time swapping Christopher Isherwood’s work for that of Austin Wright, and his novel, Tony and Susan. Should be good, eh?

Well, actually, no. This is a movie that can be admired for several reasons. For instance, there’s Seamus McGarvey’s often exquisite cinematography, whether he’s using the lens to amplify the sterile environments lead character Susan (Adams) spends her life inhabiting, or the tactile desert locations where the novel within the movie takes place. And then there’s Abel Korzeniowski’s string-driven score, which adds a delicious sense of impending doom to both storylines. But despite these solid, unassailable elements, what Ford attempts with the twin narratives doesn’t pan out quite as well.

With its performance art opening sequence, Nocturnal Animals wants to keep the viewer wrong-footed, and it wants to keep its secrets all to itself. As you’re confronted by several large, ultra-wobbly ladies who are gyrating in the nude, Ford has already placed the viewer on the back foot. What you’re seeing, he seems to be saying, will be explained; just not right away. And this is how the tone of the movie is set from the beginning: you’ll see a lot of things that won’t immediately make sense, but in time they will… except for the things Ford has no intention of making clear. So, the naked ladies are part of an art exhibition at the gallery Susan owns. But Susan doesn’t seem to be too impressed by this particular exhibit. She appears to be elsewhere, caught up in her own thoughts. But again – already – Ford isn’t about to tell you what those thoughts are, or what they’ll mean (if anything) going forward.

We soon learn that Susan is on her second marriage, to a diffident, disconnected lump of a man called Hutton (Hammer). It’s obvious he doesn’t love her anymore, and he’s likely having an affair, but Susan doesn’t seem interested either way. She makes an effort toward they’re going away together but Hutton is too busy, and Susan is too lethargic to insist or get him to clarify the dates they can go. And while the viewer wonders if this is going to be yet another mannered, “arthouse” examination of a marriage break up with plenty of wistful stares into the distance by the wife, while the husband is unable to talk in meaningful sentences, Ford changes tack and introduces Susan’s ex-husband, Edward (Gyllenhaal).

But not in person. No, instead, Edward is introduced to us through a novel he’s written, and one that he’s dedicated to Susan. Surprised – but more importantly so that the movie can proceed in a viable fashion, intrigued – Susan begins to read it. It’s not what she expects, though. But let’s think about that. What was she expecting? And why? Because, as we later discover, Susan had no faith in Edward’s abilities as a writer. So why does she even read it? Curiosity? To reinforce her opinion about his talent (or lack of it)? Because she’s bored? (At home, Susan doesn’t appear to do very much apart from drink the occasional glass of wine.) Actually, it doesn’t matter, as it’s one of the things Ford isn’t going to take the time to explain.

The story is a brutal one. Tony Hastings (Gyllenhaal) is travelling through the desert with his wife, Laura (Fisher), and daughter India (Bamber). Run off the road by a trio of men led by the would-be charming Ray (Taylor-Johnson), the family is threatened and verbally abused until chance sees Ray and one of his cohorts take the Hastings’ car – with Laura and India in it – and drive off, leaving Tony at the mercy of remaining “drunk baby” Lou (Glasman). Tony is made to drive after them, but it soon becomes obvious that Lou is just stringing him along, and Lou eventually makes Tony stop the car and get out; and then he drives off. Ray makes it back to the highway and hitches a ride to the nearest town. There he meets Detective Bobby Andes (Shannon) who agrees to go back out into the desert and check for the whereabouts of Tony’s family. They find them, both dead, but no sign of Ray and his buddies.

At this point, viewers should notice one of two things: that the character of Bobby Andes is at once more interesting and vital than anyone else in the movie (even Taylor-Johnson, who’s menacing and feral in equal measure), and secondly, that Edward’s novel, while intended to act as an emotional counterpoint to Susan’s life up until then, does get less involving and more straightforward as it continues. This allows two other, distinct things to happen: one) for Susan to begin to rethink her tidily tucked away feelings toward Edward, and two) for Ford to indulge in the kind of macho Western-style movie making once epitomised by the likes of Nicholas Ray and Budd Boetticher. But by then it’s all too late. Tony’s story can only have one outcome (which it does in such a contrived way you can hardly credit Ford the director agreeing with Ford the writer that it’s even partway acceptable dramatically), and the resolution to Susan’s immediate tale hints at a new beginning that she won’t be able to grasp.

Throughout, Ford places great stock on having Adams stare off into space and think deep thoughts about her past with Edward and her present with Hutton, but it’s largely to little or no effect. Part of the problem is that Susan isn’t particularly likeable. In her time with Edward we witness what a horrible person she is beneath the surface veneer of respectability that she’s gained by being a gallery owner. This leaves her storyline feeling (and looking) like a succession of still-life paintings waiting to be given three-dimensional expression. But this isn’t on Ford’s agenda; more shots of Adams staring into space most definitely are though. Adams is a fine actress – see Arrival (2016) if you’re not sure – but here she’s wasted in a role that requires her to internalise her character’s feelings… and then leave them there. The actress is called upon to make so little of her role it’s almost insulting; why hire someone who’s capable of doing so much more than you’ll let them?

Fortunately, Shannon and Taylor-Johnson are on hand to breathe distinct and recognisable life into their respective roles, elevating the material through sheer force of skill, and making it difficult to look away from either of them, even if they’re in a scene together. Gyllenhaal, though, is a cypher, playing two roles and being made to appear as more of a supporting actor than someone given second billing and the responsibility of portraying two important characters. There are times when Gyllenhaal can only shine when the material challenges him in such a way that he has no choice but to commit himself wholly to the part. Movies such as Enemy (2013) and Nightcrawler (2014) show this, but here Ford makes the character of Tony a bystander in his own story, while Edward’s contribution to Susan’s tale is limited by the decision to focus on that particular story from Susan’s entirely subjective point of view (you can’t trust her memories).

Ultimately, Ford makes the mistake of believing that his adaptation carries the necessary weight and complexity to make each narrative work both against and for each other. And this leads to the viewer being unable to connect with any of the characters, or feel able to show any sympathy towards them (only Shannon’s ailing cop elicits any credible feeling in the audience). It’s as if Ford has decided he wants to make a movie where the idea of leading a self-contained life (Susan’s) is preferable to one where hazards and risks (Tony’s) are more likely to happen. Either way, the one-time Gucci guru has made something that plays to its strengths as the new Tom Ford movie, but which lacks a clear identity all of its own.

Rating: 5/10 – too much smoke and too many mirrors means Nocturnal Animals isn’t as effective as its writer/director would like you to believe – or as persuasive; it goes without saying that the movie has a tremendous visual sense, but it’s a shame that a similar level of effort wasn’t afforded the script or the characters.

The Tip of the Iceberg (2016)

14 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Bárbara Goenaga, Bullying, Carmelo Gómez, David Cánovas, Drama, Fernando Cayo, Investigation, Maribel Verdú, Review, Spain, Suicides, Thriller

Original title: La punta del iceberg

D: David Cánovas / 96m

Cast: Maribel Verdú, Carmelo Gómez, Fernando Cayo, Bárbara Goenaga, Jesús Castejón, Carlo D’Ursi, Juan Fernández, Álex García, Ginés García Millán, Nieve de Medina

Why have three employees at the Tecnocentro offices committed suicide in the last few months? Is there a link between the three untimely deaths? And if there is, is their work the link? These and other questions, and any answers, become the responsibility of project manager Sofia Cuevas (Verdú). Tasked by her boss, Enzo (D’Ursi), with visiting the offices, speaking to the staff there, and compiling a report, Sofia isn’t too keen on the idea. Unable to get out of it, she arrives there and meets the head of the Tecnocentro division, Carlos Fresno (Cayo). He’s abrasive, abrupt, and won’t entertain the idea that there is any link between the three men other than that they were unable to deal with the pressures associated with their jobs.

Unimpressed by Fresno’s uncaring attitude, Sofia is further dismayed when she learns that the office she is allocated to work from, was the office of the last man to kill himself, Marcelo Miralles (Millán). She talks to Miralles’ secretary, Gabriela Benassar (Goenaga), and begins to get the feeling that not all is right at Tecnocentro. As she learns more about the demands made of the employees there, she begins to suspect that Fresno’s management skills leave something to be desired, and that he’s guilty of bullying people. But is it enough to link the three men, or even to explain why they took their own lives, and all at the Tecnocentro offices?

Sofia eventually learns far more than she expected about Fresno’s management style, and is provided with enough evidence to see him dismissed. With a further tragedy looming, and Fresno making it clear to Sofia that if she writes the correct report she can expect a promotion and the commensurate raise, she is faced with the possibility that her investigation is merely a matter of protocol. But if it is, how can she proceed, and how can she ensure that Fresno’s bullying isn’t ignored or swept under the carpet?

The answer to that final question is, in the end, quite an obvious one. The viewer is given advance warning of how The Tip of the Iceberg will end soon after Sofia arrives at Tecnocentro and she receives a certain phone call. Everything that happens between that particular call and the one that closes the movie is largely filler; the viewer doesn’t have to have seen many corporate thrillers to know that the company is up to no good, that it views its employees as entirely expendable, and that the bigwigs in charge have no intention of making any changes – and especially if it will affect the bottom line.

So the movie offers nothing new in terms of plot or storyline. It’s clear from the start that Sofia is regarded by her male bosses as dependable in a way that is also patronising. She doesn’t have much of a life outside the offices where she works, she says she’s still in a relationship with a botanist when anyone asks but later reveals that she isn’t, and her reputation as being tough and uncompromising precedes her to the Tecnocentro building. She’s a “safe pair of hands”, expected to go in there, do her job (as instructed), and come back. She’s not expected to rock the boat.

But while Sofia may be tough and uncompromising, she also has standards, and worse still for the company she works for – which is never named – she has principles too. When her investigation reveals levels of bullying for which there can be no justification, it’s Sofia’s quiet outrage that ensures this matter won’t be swept under the carpet, or left to wither and die for lack of attention. But despite all this, she’s still a woman in a predominantly man’s world, and the movie articulates this throughout, sometimes cleverly, though usually with a bluntness that is actually a little tarnished thanks to the way in which it’s driven home.

Elsewhere in the script, which is an adaptation of a play by Antonio Tabares, and was co-written by director Cánovas, José Amaro Carrillo, and Alberto García Martín, there are quite heavy doses of sexism, with Álex García’s super-confident Jaime Salas hitting on Sofia at every opportunity, and her role as investigator being undermined by almost everyone who she comes into contact with. This is meant to be a damning critique of the entrenched ideas at the heart of modern business ethics, but while it has some merit on that level, it’s laboured use within the movie doesn’t add anything to the basic storyline. The same goes for the way in which Goenaga’s exploited secretary, Gabriela, is treated by both Miralles and Fresno (and which leads you to wonder why she works at Tecnocentro in the first place).

But while the movie doesn’t offer very much in the way of originality, it does feature impressive – and expressive – art direction by Uxua Castelló that is admirably enhanced and emboldened by Juan Carlos Gómez’s chilly cinematography. The Tecnocentro offices are open-plan yet claustrophobic at the same time, and there’s a surface glamour to everything that belies the distress and desperation being experienced by most of the employees. Adding to the sense of unease and dismay that permeates the visuals is a quietly angry performance by Verdú that anchors the movie and provides the viewer with someone to eventually root for (such is our first impression of Sofia: that she has adopted the don’t care attitude of her male colleagues in an effort to fit in, that we don’t trust her to see or understand the problems going on at Tecnocentro).

Making his feature debut, director David Cánovas has created a dangerous world of expediency and mistrust that doesn’t allow Sofia to be herself until she’s faced with the logical, and tragic, extension of the management style – profits before employees – that she is a willing part of. As he explores this notion, Cánovas makes some salient points about modern technology’s demands on people’s time and effort, and the way in which large corporations or companies justify their constant chasing after profits as the only way they can validate themselves. It’s just a shame that these points are used in service of a largely pedestrian plot, and aren’t expanded on to make sure that the somewhat tepid thriller elements are allowed to have more of an impact.

Rating: 7/10 – some viewers may be wondering, “Is that it?” by the movie’s end, but The Tip of the Iceberg is a slow-burn drama that seems like it’s not trying too hard, but which has a steeliness to it that makes up for the lack of originality; Verdú is on fine form as usual, and strong supporting turns from the likes of Gómez (as an unreliable union rep) and Goenaga help bring a strong sense of humanity to a movie that points out how badly some employers can behave – and deliberately so.

Question of the Week – 13 November 2016

13 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Maribel Verdú, Matchstick Men, Odd One Out, Performances, Question of the Week, Sam Rockwell, Y tu mamá también

Sometimes, when you’re looking through an actor or actress’s filmography, you discover a movie you’d either forgotten they were in, or that you didn’t even realise they were in it in the first place. This happened to me earlier today when I was checking the career of Spanish actress Maribel Verdú, and was reminded that she was the “older woman” in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también (2001) (well, it was a while ago, and I haven’t seen the movie since it came out).

It got me thinking about other stars and the movies they’ve appeared in “back in the day”. Not their first performances, but roles where the passage of time has meant that it’s unlikely you’d remember them being in a certain movie, such as Sam Rockwell in Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men (2003). Using this as an example of early onset Alzheimer’s, here are five stars and five movies they may or may not have appeared in.

John Goodman Infamous (2006)

Sandra Bullock Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011)

Bradley Cooper Lullaby (2014)

Ryan Gosling Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011)

Kristen Wiig The Midnight Meat Train (2008)

All of which leads to this week’s Question of the Week:

Which star didn’t appear in which movie (and no looking it up on IMDb)?

Where There’s a Prank, There’s a Pay Off: Spider (2007) and Family Values (2011)

12 Saturday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Alan Lovell, Australia, Black comedy, Comedy, David Michôd, Drama, Matthew Jenkin, Mirrah Foulkes, Nash Edgerton, Pranks, Reviews, Rubber spider, Ryan Johnson, Short movies

Here are two Australian short movies that not only play with the idea that karma isn’t something to mess with, but which also adopt a darkly comic approach to the stories they’re telling.

Spider (2007) / D: Nash Edgerton / 9m

Cast: Nash Edgerton, Mirrah Foulkes, Chum Ehelepola, Bruno Xavier, David Michôd, Sebastian Dickins, Tony Lynch, Joel Edgerton, Ashley Fairfield

In Spider, we soon learn that Jack (Edgerton) has done something to make Jill (Foulkes) really mad at him. As they drive around Sydney, Jack tries to make things right but Jill is resistant. When they reach a filling station, Jack takes the opportunity to go into the shop and buy Jill some things by way of an apology. But he can’t resist playing yet one more prank on her, and hides a rubber spider in the car where she’ll eventually find it. They drive off, and Jack’s purchase of chocolates begins to have an effect: Jill starts talking to him again (much to her personal disappointment).

But when she discovers the spider and freaks out, she nearly crashes the car. With the car brought to a halt, Jill gets out of the car in a hurry; Jack tries to placate her by saying the spider isn’t real, and by throwing it at her (not the smartest move). Jill jumps back and is immediately hit by another car, and badly injured. Overwhelmed by guilt, and fearful of what she might tell the police when she’s able to, Jack hovers around the paramedics when they arrive, and finds himself an unwitting victim of karma.

There isn’t much of a story to Spider, but then there doesn’t need to be. It’s a self-contained short movie that’s concentrating as much on the dark humour of the piece, as well as the grim inevitability of the outcome of Jack’s pranking. Working with future helmer David Michôd – Animal Kingdom (2010), The Rover (2014) – director Edgerton fashions a script that the viewer is certain will lead to disaster, and he keeps the viewer waiting for that disaster to happen. And yet when it does, Edgerton is clever enough to delay the moment – and not just once – giving the viewer just enough time to wonder if the consequences of Jack’s prank will come from a different direction.

Edgerton is also wise enough to know that his main characters should be drawn in broad strokes and that any further depth isn’t required. This is a movie where Jack and Jill are merely conduits for the story’s blackly comic denouement. That both will suffer as the result of Jack’s stupidity is a given, and while what happens to Jill could be described as unnecessarily nasty, what happens to Jack tempers that by being appropriately cruel. Edgerton judges the tone perfectly, and is aided by his and Luke Doolan’s careful, purposeful editing.

Rating: 8/10 – not the first short movie made by Edgerton, Spider is nevertheless one of his more well-constructed offerings, and one that bears repeat viewings; with one of the more impressive person versus car collisions to recommend it as well, this is a movie that packs a lot into its short running time and to considerably good effect.

Spider can be viewed on YouTube here:

Family Values (2011) / D: Matthew Jenkin / 7m

Cast: Alan Lovell, Ryan Jackson, Oliver Leimbach, Zoe Carides

In Family Values, a father (Lovell) who decides his two sons need to be taught a bit of a lesson, coerces his eldest son, Tom (Johnson), into helping him convince his youngest son, Jack (Leimbach), that he – the father – has suddenly passed away. The father hopes this will teach him to be more respectful and visit more often (by making Jack feel guilty). But when Jack arrives and hears the “sad news”, his reaction is unexpected: he’s pleased his father is dead, and especially as he’d changed his will and left the family business to Jack. Tom is horrified by this news, having spent the last ten years building it up to where it is today, and making it a success.

In a fit of rage he causes his father to “wake up”, and when he does, their father reveals he’s played a trick on both of them. Further enraged, Tom smothers his father with a pillow, and kills him. Both sons are horrified at what’s happened, and at how quickly and easily things have gotten out of hand. And then their mother (Carides) comes home, and at first, it’s very hard to convince her that the news of her husband’s death hasn’t been exaggerated, or is part of a prank. But when they do finally convince her…

Like Spider, Family Values doesn’t really have much of a story, but then it doesn’t need to have one. A straightforward tale of misfiring pranks where no one comes off any better than anyone else (well… mostly), it revolves around a situation that spirals out of control quickly and with unexpected consequences. As such it’s a tightly constructed and controlled movie that wants to have a lot of fun at its characters’ expense, while also providing solid entertainment for the viewer. Writer/director Jenkin skirts close to making a farce out of it all, but manages to rein in the obvious temptation to let his cast go over the top, and in doing so makes the heightened absurdity of the situation more credible (if still highly unlikely).

He also makes the most of his single location, moving the camera round the room to good effect, though by the time the mother arrives home, the room looks to have become too crowded, what with the actors, the camera crew, the director and anyone else involved apparently getting in each other’s way and forcing cinematographers Bradley J. Conomy and Max Seager into some awkward camera positions. This upsets the visual rhythm the movie has established up until then, and it’s unfortunate that it disrupts the flow, but Jenkin rescues the situation – and the framing – before it threatens to ruin things at the end. And as with Spider, it’s the instigator who ends up on the receiving end when his prank backfires, although here it isn’t quite as physically shocking as what happens to Jack – thankfully.

Rating: 7/10 – Jenkin is a movie maker who consistently tries to entertain his audiences as simply and easily as possible, and Family Values is no different in that respect from his other movies; smart and amusing, there’s much to enjoy here, and for once, the shallow nature of the relationships doesn’t detract from the fun to be had.

Family Values can be viewed on YouTube here:

The Accountant (2016)

11 Friday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Action, Anna Kendrick, Autism, Ben Affleck, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Drama, Gavin O'Connor, J.K. Simmons, John Lithgow, Jon Bernthal, Living Robotics, Review, Thriller, Treasury

D: Gavin O’Connor / 128m

Cast: Ben Affleck, Anna Kendrick, J.K. Simmons, Jon Bernthal, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, John Lithgow, Jeffrey Tambor, Jean Smart, Andy Umberger, Robert C. Treveiler

To all intents and purposes, Christian Wolff (Affleck) is a public certified accountant who also happens to have high-functioning autism. He’s occasionally blunt to the point of rudeness, has trouble interacting with other people in certain situations, does his best to fit in, lives alone in a spartan apartment, and is the man to go to if you’re a big time criminal organisation and you want your “books” to look whiter than white. Over time he’s attracted the attention of the US Treasury Department, and in particular, soon-to-be-retired agent Ray King (Simmons), who wants to track Wolff down before he goes. To this end, he coerces Treasury analyst Marybeth Medina (Addai-Robinson) into helping him.

Meanwhile, Wolff is hired by a legitimate company, Living Robotics, to audit their accounts in full as one of their own analysts, Dana Cummings (Kendrick), has spotted what appears to be a huge, unaccounted loss. The company is owned by Lamar Blackburn (Lithgow), and it makes high-end prosthetic limbs. Wolff soon goes to work and it doesn’t take him long to identify just how much money has been stolen from the company – over $61m. But the apparent suicide of one of the company’s senior executives (and a lifelong friend of Blackburn’s) brings Wolff’s investigation to an abrupt halt. But Wolff is unable to leave it at that and intends to find out if the senior executive was responsible.

There follows an attempt on his life which he foils, and he learns that Dana is being targeted as well. He gets to her in time and going against his usual “mission parameters” he determines to keep her safe. In the meantime, Medina has managed to put a name to the face of the “Accountant” and has tracked him to where he lives, but with Wolff having gone to ground after the attempts on his and Dana’s lives, the Treasury Department is no nearer to catching him. Holed up in a fancy hotel, he and Dana develop a friendship, while Wolff figures out that Living Robotics hasn’t been stolen from, but that they’re operating a scam designed to inflate their share price when the company goes public. Now that he knows what’s been going on and why, Wolff decides to pay Lamar Blackburn a home visit… but Blackburn has a small, private army, led by The Assassin (Bernthal), in place to ensure that Wolff doesn’t get to “finish the job” he started.

On the surface, The Accountant is a slightly above average Hollywood action thriller with a good cast and good production values. Its decision to make its central character suffer from autism – even if it’s at the high end of the range – is different, and for the most part, works thanks to Affleck’s studied, and muted, performance (the script does, however, have to keep reminding itself that Wolff is indeed autistic, and should show some ritual behaviour from time to time). Also for the most part, it makes the usual unexplained narrative leaps that compromise the logic and flow of the story, and has many of its characters doing things in ways that are consistently at odds with their usual behaviour.

It’s also a movie that contains a number of scenes that are so redundant or unnecessary (and sometimes both) that you begin to wonder if a Director’s Cut due to be released on Blu-ray and DVD in six months’ time has been released to cinemas instead. When King coerces Medina into helping him track down Wolff, he does it by virtue of her having lied on her Treasury application form; she helps him or he’ll see that she’s prosecuted (forget that he appears to be the only one who’s vetted her properly since she applied). As the scene plays out, the viewer can only sit back and ask themselves, couldn’t he have just asked for her help, or used his seniority to get her working on the case? Wouldn’t that have been simpler? Of course it would, but the scene is there nevertheless, and the way it pans out it just doesn’t work.

Elsewhere, Wolff and Dana hit it off way too quickly, not only because her life is in danger and he’s yet another assassin who’s too good deep down to “walk away”, but because it’s an attempt to remind us that Wolff can connect when he tries, and the script seems to be saying, look, give the guy a break, he’s never had a girlfriend before. It’s the wrong kind of break, though, because Wolff gets close to Anna Kendrick in full on perky, quirky mode, the actress using all her standard comic traits and reactions in a role that is yet another too easy variation on the role she usually plays almost everywhere else. In their scenes together, Affleck doesn’t even have to try too hard: he’s inhabiting the role, she’s channelling the ghost of every eager-to-please young actress from the Sixties.

And then there’s the moment, around two thirds in, where the movie decides to grind to a halt and spend around ten minutes detailing a back story involving King that nearly kills the movie’s momentum. And then there’s the final showdown between Wolff and the Assassin, which veers off into left field territory – unless you’ve been paying attention – and ends on an emotional note you won’t have seen coming. All of which adds up to a movie which is, appropriately or not, somewhat schizophrenic in places, or perhaps put more plainly, deliberately uneven.

In the end, The Accountant is yet another example of action movie making that only takes risks with its central character, and only when it doesn’t get in the way of his being an extremely talented assassin. The scenes where we witness Wolff grow from easily agitated pre-teen to kick-ass teenager thanks to his tough-as-nails father are weirdly compelling (when they shouldn’t be), and the action sequences are imaginative and well choreographed for the most part, even if they also lack the necessary “wow” factor that should have viewers hoping for more. By the end it’s clear that the producers are hoping that further on down the line there’ll be more adventures for Christian Wolff as he goes about writing other wrongs with his pocket protector and his high-calibre arsenal.

Rating: 7/10 – worth seeing for another committed performance from Affleck that elevates the otherwise pedestrian nature of the material on offer, The Accountant does its best to be more than a standard Hollywood action thriller, but can’t quite pull it off; with O’Connor handling things well from behind the camera, but without injecting too much pizzazz into proceedings, the movie ends up being exactly the kind of Saturday night choice that goes perfectly with pizza and beer.

Arrival (2016)

10 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Aliens, Amy Adams, China, Denis Villeneuve, Drama, Forest Whitaker, Jeremy Renner, Literary adaptation, Michael Stuhlbarg, Montana, Mystery, Review, Sci-fi, Shells, Thriller, Translation

D: Denis Villeneuve / 116m

Cast: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, Mark O’Brien, Tzi Ma

Louise Banks (Adams) is a linguistics professor whose private life has recently been shattered by the break up of her marriage and the death of her daughter from cancer. Getting by but still grieving, Louise is as unprepared as the rest of the world when twelve huge spaceships suddenly appear one day in different locations around the globe. Soon, though, she is approached by the US military – in the form of Colonel G.T. Weber (Whitaker) – to aid in communicating with the aliens on board the ship that hovers over American soil in Montana. The best in her field in terms of linguistics and translations, Louise joins Weber’s team along with mathematician and scientist Ian Donnelly (Renner).

In Montana, Louise and Ian are advised that the most important question is, What do they want? Later, they ascend into the ship – called a “shell” by the military – and have their first encounter with the aliens. A symbol is written on the screen that separates the aliens in their atmosphere from Louise and Ian et al in theirs. Using it as the basis of the aliens’ language, Louise soon deduces that the symbol doesn’t just translate into one word, but into many. From then on she is able to determine much more of how the aliens communicate. Meanwhile, at the other arrival sites, particularly in China, suspicion and distrust of the aliens’ intensions are leading to veiled threats of attack on the shells, while violent unrest occurs around the globe.

Louise begins to have visions of a little girl, who in various ways helps her to understand more of what the aliens are communicating. When she translates a symbol and the meaning is “Offer weapon”, it causes the CIA agent in charge of the whole operation in Montana, Halpern (Stuhlbarg), to order an evacuation. But Louise insists they should stay, to keep faith with the aliens, and to complete the mission to find out why they are here. She returns to the shell by herself, and by coming into direct contact with the aliens, Louise learns why they have arrived, and why she’s having visions of the little girl, a revelation that has a profound effect not just on her, but on her understanding of her marriage and also, her daughter’s death.

There’s a dearth of good, old-fashioned, serious sci-fi in the movies right now – in fact, it’s been that way for some time – but Arrival is here to redress the balance. Playing with notions of time and memory and the nature of happiness, the movie is a thought-provoking treatise on what it is to mourn a life while discovering at the same time that that life has much more to offer even though the person has passed away. It’s a bit of a mindbender at times, but Villeneuve confidently handles the narrative twists and turns of Eric Heisserer’s script – itself an adaptation of the short story Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang and heavily reworked by Villeneuve himself – so that the viewer can still grasp the subtleties of what’s happening and why.

Along the way, said viewer is treated to an intelligent story and plot that packs an unexpectedly emotional wallop towards the end, as the various strands of Louise’s life are brought into sharp relief, and the aliens’ reason for visiting Earth is revealed. Louise herself is brought to life by Adams in a performance that acts as a reminder that, away from the DC Extended Universe, she is still one of today’s finest actresses. As the emotionally distant Louise, Adams shows just how removed she is from everything going on around her – at first. But as Louise slowly begins to unravel the complex patterns of the aliens’ language, she begins to reconnect with herself and everyone around her; and particularly Ian. Adams is the movie’s chief ingredient for success, her succinct, subtle portrayal of Louise proving layered and intuitive, and deeply moving come the movie’s end.

But while Adams’ performance is the bedrock upon which the movie supports itself, there’s so much more to recommend it. Though she plays the central character, and the rest of the cast have essentially supporting roles, the likes of Renner and Whitaker still manage to contribute well-rounded and credible characters that are necessary to the plot, while even Stuhlbarg’s paranoid (and potentially one-note) CIA agent fits in to the overall set up without feeling extraneous or unnecessarily villainous. Villeneuve also allows each character to display their own fears and concerns, and a corresponding sense of wonder, at being in such close proximity to the aliens and their craft.

Visually, the movie is a gloomy-looking, though consistently well-thought out viewing experience, with Villeneuve choosing to dial down on any bright colours and in doing so, adding texture to the narrative. The aliens operate in a cloudy grey environment and “write” using appendages that produce a black inky substance that is surprisingly vibrant, while at the military base, the various comms rooms and private quarters also lack for vivid colours, with only computer screens providing any brightness to offset the gloom. Villeneuve is making a conscious choice here: the bleak, low-lit hive of activity reflecting the interior of the aliens’ ship, as if to insinuate that there is a greater level of connection between “us” and “them” than is immediately apparent.

The visuals are more than ably supported by a distinctive sound design that unnerves far more than it reassures, and which also includes a suitably eerie and mournful score by Jóhann Jóhannsson, Villeneuve’s go-to composer. Keeping the viewer on edge as Louise deconstructs the alien message, the visuals and the sound design combine to create a haunting, other-worldly feel that is not only entirely appropriate given the nature of the story, but also serves to highlight the idea that if we aren’t alone in the universe, then ideas of melody and tone may still hold but are likely to be interpreted in completely different ways.

Ultimately though, it’s Villeneuve’s confident handling of the material that impresses the most. He’s not afraid to take his time in telling the story, and doesn’t drip-feed all the relevant information at regular points in the narrative. Instead he lets the story unfold at its own pace, revealing key plot points quietly and without the usual fanfare required in other sci-fi movies, and the result is a measured, affecting tale that contains a major twist, one that perhaps for the first time, is allowed to play out over much of the movie’s running time, rather than just suddenly and without warning, and which in its simplicity and emotional effectiveness, elevates Arrival over and above any other sci-fi movie you’re likely to see this year (and probably for some time to come).

Rating: 9/10 – a beautifully constructed movie with a clever, intelligent script, superb cinematography from Bradford Young, an intense soundtrack, heartfelt performances and all held together by a director at the top of his game, Arrival is a must-see movie that is less about why the aliens are here, and more about why we are here; quite simply, one of this year’s best movies.

10 Reasons to Remember Raoul Coutard (1924-2016)

09 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Career, Cinematographer, Director, Jean-Luc Godard, Nouvelle Vague, Raoul Coutard

Raoul Coutard (16 September 1924 – 8 November 2016)

A key influence on the look and style of movies made during the Nouvelle Vague period (covering the late Fifties and the Sixties), Raoul Coutard was a cinematographer known primarily for his work with Jean-Luc Godard, but he also worked with the likes of Jacques Demy, François Truffaut, and Costa-Gravas.

Coutard served in the Indochina War (1946-1954), and ended up living and working in Vietnam for eleven years as a war photographer. In 1956 he was asked by Pierre Schoendoerffer to work on a documentary called The Devil’s Pass (1958); Coutard accepted due to a misunderstanding: he thought he was being hired to take stills shots. From there he shot two more movies for Schoendoerffer, and in 1959 was hired by Godard’s producer Georges de Beauregard to work on Godard’s first feature, Breathless (1960). Godard had had somebody else in mind for the job but the end result saw Coutard shoot all of Godard’s movies bar Masculin, féminin (1966) from then until 1967. Coutard was adept at using handheld cameras for Godard’s low-budget black and white movies, but he really impressed the director when it came to shooting his widescreen, colour movies: Coutard created a lighting rig that enabled shooting inside places without enough natural light.

Coutard’s career slowed down in the Seventies, though he did direct his first feature, Hoa Binh (1970); it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and won the prize for Best First Work at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival. He reunited with Godard in 1982 on Passion, and from then on Coutard began to work more consistently. His work continued to be distinctive and an asset to the projects he worked on, right up until his last work on Philippe Garrel’s Wild Innocence (2001). But he will always be remembered for the movies he made in the early to mid-Sixties, a selection of classic French movies that have stood the test of time not just because of the passions and fearlessness of their writers and directors, but also because of the way that Coutard illuminated those passions and that fearlessness through the immediacy of his visual style.

1 – À bout de souffle (Breathless) (1960)

2 – Une Femme est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman) (1961)

3 – Jules et Jim (1962)

4 – Le Mépris (Contempt) (1963)

5 – Bande à part (Band of Outsiders) (1964)

6 – Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville, a Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution) (1965)

7 – Pierrot le Fou (1965)

8 – Weekend (1967)

9 – Z (1969)

10 – Passion (1982)

Despite the Falling Snow (2016)

08 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Antje Traue, Charles Dance, Cold War, Defection, Drama, Espionage, Literary adaptation, Moscow, Rebecca Ferguson, Review, Romance, Russia, Sam Reid, Shamim Sarif, Spying

D: Shamim Sarif / 93m

Cast: Rebecca Ferguson, Sam Reid, Charles Dance, Antje Traue, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Thure Lindhardt, Anthony Head

One of the things that never happened in the Golden Age of Cinema was an author being given the opportunity to make a movie of one of their novels or stories. Some were employed to adapt their novels and stories, but none were ever allowed to step behind the camera as well and actually direct the movie. Nowadays, this isn’t so unusual, but it’s also still not very prevalent. So step forward Shamim Sarif, author and movie maker, who has been making movies from her novels from the very beginning. She is possibly unique in this way, and has gained a very good reputation from working on both sides of the creative arena. Despite the Falling Snow is the third movie she’s made from one of her novels, and while she may be well regarded in some quarters as the perfect person to adapt her work – after all, who knows it better than she? – the finished product here isn’t quite the testament to her talents as a director.

The movie begins in New York in 1961 with the defection of a Russian government official called Sasha (Reid). As he’s helped to escape from his Russian handlers, he asks about his wife, Katya (Ferguson). She’s back in Moscow, but his new, US handlers have no idea where she is or what has happened to her. Fast forward thirty years and Sasha (Dance) is a successful restaurateur who has a niece, Lauren (also Ferguson) who is the spitting image of Katya, and who wants to travel to Moscow to try and find out what happened to her aunt. Sasha refuses to go with her, though, so Lauren, who’s lucky enough to be an artist who’s been asked to mount an exhibition in Moscow, heads off by herself.

While Lauren’s story plays out in 1991, Katya’s story plays out in tandem from 1959 to 1961. Katya is a teaching assistant who’s also helping her friend and government official Misha (Jackson-Cohen) steal secrets and pass them on to the Americans. At a party she meets Sasha but is unimpressed by him. It’s only when Misha persuades her to get close to Sasha because of his position in the Kremlin that she finds herself falling in love with him. Meanwhile, in 1991, Lauren meets and befriends a journalist called Marina (Traue) who helps her in finding out about Katya. Marina learns that Misha (Head) is still alive, and they make plans to visit him. When they do they find he’s become an embittered, angry old man who wants nothing to do with them.

Back in 1961, Katya and Sasha wed, but she agonises over whether she should tell him she’s a spy. In 1991, Marina’s behaviour becomes suspicious, and the unexpected arrival of Sasha in Moscow prompts a revelation. Katya’s decision to tell Sasha leads to his agreeing to defect, but thirty years on only Misha holds the key to what happened to her.

A romantic drama set – partly – during a period of intense political and social upheaval, namely the early Sixties, Despite the Falling Snow has such a generic feel to it that it could have been made about any couple in any country at any time, and still have made the same kind of impact. This is thanks to Sarif’s uninspired, pedestrian direction, and a visual style that never rises above formulaic. It’s as if Sarif has forgotten to add the drama needed to make the narrative more than just a succession of events and scenes that show how two people came together and then were separated by fate in the form of expediency. Even when suspicion falls on the officials in the Kremlin, including Sasha and Misha, it’s a moment where real terror at being found out translates instead as a mild concern. Misha is almost fatalistic about the whole thing, a reaction that not even the talented Jackson-Cohen can make convincing; this man should be even more scared than he’s been already.

But if the steady stream of narrative downplaying that infuses the scenes in early Sixties Russia also makes those scenes feel awkward and inconsistent, then spare a thought for those set in 1991. Sarif makes reference to the Berlin Wall having come down two years earlier, but her new Moscow is an uneasy mix of contemporary US stylings and Russian forebearance, as evidenced by Marina’s designer clothing and old Misha’s tower block abode. The juxtaposition jars, and adds to the overall feeling that Sarif wants her characters to look glamorous against the concrete backdrop of post-Stalinist Russia (Katya seems never to be without her red lipstick). The visual conceit is highlighted by Sarif’s decision to have Katya and Sasha, and Lauren and Marina, walk along the same snow-laden stretch of riverside pavement at different times, but instead of creating an echo of past events, it appears to be more of a budgetary deference than a creative decision.

Elsewhere, narrative developments that appear out of nowhere are treated as if they are absolutely necessary to the overall plot, and that includes a left-field decision to have Lauren and Marina begin a sexual relationship. Old Sasha’s willingness to stay home out of harm’s way is overturned by the contents of a fax, while Old Misha’s decision to spill the beans about what happened to Katya is spurred on by feelings of guilt, and that old chestnut, a terminal illness. And when the viewer does find out what happened to Katya, Sarif handles it in such a hamfisted way that any emotional weight the scene might – or should – have engendered with said viewer, is lost before the scene’s even begun.

A lacklustre movie then, one that doesn’t even aim particularly high, but which does feature another of Charles Dance’s supporting roles (is he semi-retired now, is that what’s going on?) and a level of political naïvete that further dilutes the drama that isn’t really there. On the performance side, Ferguson is unable to make much of either role, as Sarif never allows the viewer to engage with them as anything other than under-developed non-characters. Reid is earnest but treading in a pool so shallow it’s practically evaporated, while Traue is allowed to look moody and resentful in equal measure even when she’s kissing Ferguson. Dance and Head bring a degree of old-time gravitas to the proceedings, but even they can’t avoid the pitfalls that are inherent in the script. On this showing, Sarif needs some more time to clarify her goals in making such a movie, and maybe next time, getting someone else to direct.

Rating: 4/10 – Sixties Moscow never looked cleaner, quieter, or more family friendly than it does in this movie, and that’s despite several efforts to make it look as if it’s not brand new; as a drama it never gets started, despite the best efforts of its cast, and by the end you’ll only want to know what happened to Katya just so that you can move on in (roughly) the same way everyone else does: without too much fuss.

The Girl on the Train (2016)

07 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Alcoholism, Drama, Emily Blunt, Haley Bennett, Justin Theroux, Literary adaptation, Luke Evans, Murder, Paula Hawkins, Rebecca Ferguson, Review, Tate Taylor, Thriller

D:Tate Taylor / 112m

Cast: Emily Blunt, Haley Bennett, Rebecca Ferguson, Justin Theroux, Luke Evans, Edgar Ramírez, Laura Prepon, Allison Janney, Darren Goldstein, Lisa Kudrow

Whenever a novel becomes an unexpectedly massive success – such as Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train did in 2015 – then a movie adaptation is sure to follow. But what happens when the source material isn’t strong enough to support a movie version? What do the makers of such a movie do to combat this? The answer, when you watch the movie version of The Girl on the Train, becomes obvious quite quickly: they don’t do anything, they merely transcribe events and characters to the screen and do nothing to circumvent the problems in the novel. Oh – and they do so in the hope that no one will notice.

From the beginning of The Girl on the Train we have a clumsy voice over that introduces us to Rachel Watson, a thirty-two year old woman who rides the train to and from work every day, and who seems to have created a fantasy world built around another woman (Bennett) that she sees most days from the train. The woman in question piques Rachel’s interest, as she lives a few doors away from where Rachel’s ex-husband Tom (Theroux) lives with his new wife, Anna (Ferguson), and their baby daughter, Evie. Believing this woman to have a perfect marriage (but having no real reason to believe this at all), Rachel is shocked one morning to see her kissing a man who isn’t her husband.

Rachel is so disturbed by this that she decides to confront the woman. But Rachel is an alcoholic, and though she makes the attempt, she suffers a blackout and wakes the next morning with cuts and bruises and blood on her clothes – but no memory of how any of it happened. Things get worse when a detective (Janney) visits Rachel and asks her if she knows the woman, whose name is Megan. Megan has gone missing, and because Rachel was spotted in the area where Megan was last seen, the detective wonders if Rachel is involved in Megan’s disappearance in some way. Able to stall the detective’s questions, Rachel then makes a fateful decision.

Anyone who has read the book will know that Rachel’s decision is to involve herself in the life of Megan’s husband, Scott (Evans). And the movie follows this route as well – how could it not? – but as with the novel, the movie has the same problem: her decision makes no sense at all. It’s obvious from Rachel’s behaviour – when she’s not fantasizing about a complete stranger, she’s stalking her ex-husband – that she’s got what you’d politely call “issues”, but the only reason the movie has for this behaviour is the fact that Rachel is an alcoholic. It was a contributing factor in her divorce from Tom, and it leads to a couple of minor revelations later on, but it ends up being a catch-all for anything she does that seems a bit manic or ill-advised. The novel tries to make her appear vulnerable; here she just seems desperate.

But as her involvement with Scott is passed off as trying to help (and punish Megan if she stops being missing), Rachel abandons all sense of decency and respect for the ordeal Scott is going through, and pushes her own agenda, which is to find Megan’s abductor or killer – and hope that it isn’t her. This leads to a couple of major revelations, and a final denouement that will have female audiences cheering, and male audiences shaking their heads at the reverse misogyny on display. In essence, the problems in the novel have become the problems in the movie.

The main problem audiences will have is a lack of someone to even remotely care about. Despite a powerful and from time to time, deeply moving performance by Blunt, The Girl on the Train operates in an emotional vacuum. The trials and tribulations of the various characters are often on display, but it’s like watching a trio of strong-minded women who’ve all decided to give up on being independent, and who can only define themselves through their relationships with men. Rachel is the ex-wife who can’t deal with the fact that her marriage is over, Megan is the wife who needs affairs to feel some kind of connection with herself, and Anna is the ex-lover turned second wife whose chief function is being the mother of Tom’s child. Viewers may find themselves put off by the relentless undermining these characters experience, and the various ways the movie reinforces the ways in which said characters were undermined in the novel.

But beyond all the ersatz feminism, there remains the problem of the central mystery. Megan’s disappearance becomes a murder enquiry when her body is discovered in some nearby woods. But though Rachel wonders if she did kill Megan during her blackout, the likelihood of that actually having happened is so small it’s on a virtually sub-atomic level. So that leaves Anna, a character so gloriously one-dimensional that Ferguson’s talents as an actress are wasted; her husband Tom, whose outward calm and sincerity masks a need to control his environment; and tortured husband Scott, whose wild, angry outbursts could be a smokescreen for something much darker. And those are the only suspects, as the man Megan is seen kissing is her shrink, Dr Kamal Abdic (Ramírez), and despite the screenplay’s ham-fisted attempt to put him in the frame, he’s the classic red herring. This then makes it easy to work out who killed Megan, and also why.

For a thriller based on the novel “that shocked the world” – really? – The Girl on the Train is a bit of a damp squib, only showing signs of life when focusing on Blunt’s portrayal of Rachel. Blunt brings some much needed craft to her performance, ensuring that while everyone around her aims for competent, she’s proving capable of giving a layered, compassionate performance that elevates the material whenever her alcoholism is mentioned, or she’s on screen. In contrast, Taylor, who failed to find the motivation to make The Help (2011) as compelling as it should have been, leaves the viewer with the feeling he’s only semi-engaged with the project, and as a result, none of it resonates in the way that it should. It all leaves the movie looking and sounding like an uninspired echo of the original novel – and a less than engaging one at that.

Rating: 5/10 – slickly, professionally made, but as hollow as an Easter egg, The Girl on the Train delivers low rent thrills and annoying plot developments as it unfolds the mystery of Megan Hipwell’s disappearance; the non-linear approach of the novel is retained, and used to good effect, but this is still one literary adaptation that should have been more enticing and rewarding than it actually is.

Mini-Review: Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016)

06 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Action, Cobie Smulders, Conspiracy, Danika Yarosh, Drama, Edward Zwick, Father/daughter relationship, Lee Child, Literary adaptation, Murder, New Orleans, Sequel, Thriller, Tom Cruise, US Military

D: Edward Zwick / 118m

Cast: Tom Cruise, Cobie Smulders, Aldis Hodge, Danika Yarosh, Patrick Heusinger, Holt McCallany, Austin Hébert, Robert Knepper, Madalyn Horcher, Robert Catrini

After helping the US Military apprehend a crooked sheriff – it doesn’t matter why – Jack Reacher (Cruise) begins flirting by telephone with his contact, Major Susan Turner (Smulders). When he arrives back at his old military HQ to meet her for the first time, Reacher finds she’s been arrested on suspicion of treason. It’s all to do with an investigation she was overseeing in Afghanistan, and which involves the murder of two soldiers out there. Reacher is instantly suspicious himself, but when Turner’s attorney winds up murdered, he finds himself framed for the killing, and with only one option going forward: break Turner and himself out of military prison and go on the run while also trying to solve the conspiracy surrounding Turner’s arrest.

While all this is going on, Reacher also learns that he may have a daughter. Her name is Samantha (Yarosh), she’s fifteen years old, and she becomes involved when the mercenary assassin (Heusinger) charged with tracking down Reacher and Turner links her to her possible father. With the guilty party looking like defence contractor, Parasource, the trio travel to New Orleans and try to find the company’s middle man in Afghanistan, Daniel Prudhomme (Hébert). Frightened and in hiding, Prudhomme is eventually found, and what he tells them reveals a puzzling conspiracy involving the illegal smuggling of weaponry owned by Parasource itself, the rewards of which are outweighed by the potential worth of government contracts.

Jack Reacher (2012) made just enough money (if $218,340,595 can be considered “just enough”) to allow Jack Reacher: Never Go Back to be made. Making this only the second time that Cruise has reprised a character role, the movie again dispenses with any intention of following the sequence of Lee Child’s novels, and plumps for a more recent effort. Given that it provides Reacher with a potential daughter, you can see why Never Go Back was so attractive to the producers, including Cruise himself: let’s show the action man can be a big softie as well (though, actually, not too much of a big softie). But in the end, all this means is that the viewer is subjected to dozens of close ups of Cruise manipulating his facial expressions as if with strings, and a handful of awkward father-daughter moments that are played by rote. You can guess the outcome of this particular “mystery” from a mile away, but the movie goes through the motions with it, and never once makes it seem that Reacher and Samantha could achieve a really meaningful relationship.

This leaves the conspiracy story to lead the rest of the movie, but sadly, the movie never springs to life with it, leaving everything feeling flat and unnecessarily bland. Part of the problem is that you don’t really care what happens to anyone, even Samantha, and the mechanics of the villain’s deadly plot never catch on in the way that the writers and producers and Edward Zwick would like. None of it seems relevant, and all of it is coated with a thin layer of effort. Cruise looks determined, but often it’s difficult to work out if he’s in character or just trying to get through the filming stage. Smulders at least tries to inject some passion into things, but she’s held back by a script that actively ignores her character’s role in the military whenever it can, and at one point sidelines her as a babysitter to Samantha. It all makes the viewer “glad” that sexism can rear its ugly head in a movie, and if it’s supported by Tom Cruise then it’s all the better, and perhaps, even acceptable.

Rating: 5/10 – a sequel that lacks the bite of its predecessor, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back could also be called Jack Reacher: Never Knowingly Exciting; professionally done but a little too generic in its approach and presentation, it’s a movie that never strays out of its comfort zone, not even by accident.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016)

05 Saturday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Asa Butterfield, Drama, Eva Green, Fantasy, Hollowgasts, Peculiars, Review, Samuel L. Jackson, Terence Stamp, Tim Burton, Time loop, Wales, World War II, Ymbrynes

D: Tim Burton / 127m

Cast: Eva Green, Asa Butterfield, Samuel L. Jackson, Ella Purnell, Judi Dench, Rupert Everett, Allison Janney, Chris O’Dowd, Terence Stamp, Finlay McMillan, Lauren McCrostie, Hayden Keeler-Stone, Georgia Pemberton, Milo Parker, Raffiella Chapman, Pixie Davies, Joseph Odwell, Thomas Odwell, Cameron King, Kim Dickens

Teenager Jake Portman (Butterfield) is very close to his grandfather, Abe (Stamp), who tells him stories of when he was a boy and lived on an island off the coast of Wales during the Second World War. Abe lived at Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, a place where children with paranormal abilities could live freely and without fear of persecution. In time, Abe had to leave, but he’s never forgotten his time there, and he’s told Jake many stories during the course of Jake’s growing up, but Jake has always believed them to be Abe’s version of fairy stories. But one day, Jake finds his grandfather’s body in the woods near Abe’s home; he’s been attacked and his eyes removed. With his last breath, Abe exhorts Jake to find “the bird, the loop and September 3, 1943”.

The discovery of a letter from Miss Peregrine to Abe, added to advice given by Jake’s therapist (Janney), sees Jake and his dad, Franklin (O’Dowd), heading for Wales. They stay at the local inn, and soon, Jake is searching for the “peculiar” home. He finds it in ruins, the result of a direct hit by a German bomb on September 3, 1943. But while he marvels at confrmation of the home’s existence, several of the children Abe has told him about, make themselves known and draw Jake into their world. They travel through a “loop”, a part of time that has been folded in on itself and now re-plays the same day over and over: September 3, 1943. And Jake meets Miss Peregrine (Green) herself, the children’s guardian, called an Ymbryne, a bird able to take human form (and vice versa) and manipulate time.

Miss Peregrine wastes no time in welcoming Jake into the home, and he spends the evening there until he realises his father will be looking for him. He returns as quickly as he can, but not before Miss Peregrine shows him just how dangerous it is outside of her protection. Jake sees a hideous creature called a “Hollowgast” come for the children before Miss Peregrine dispatches it with a crossbow. From there stems a warning relating to Wights, former Peculiars who have been the unfortunate victims of an experiment to harness an Ymbryne’s power. One Wight in particular, Mr Barron (Jackson), has made it his mission to track down all the Ymbrynes and take their eyes. But while the way through the loop remains hidden, the children are safe… until Jake unwittingly leads Mr Barron right to them…

When author Ransom Riggs’ novel, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was first published in 2011, it was an unexpected success. Riggs’ tale of peculiar children with strange abilities and the evil creatures that hunt them was the first in a trilogy of novels that breathed new life into gothic fantasy. It was obvious that a movie version would be made, and who better to bring the novel to life than Tim Burton? His brand of weird humour and his visual stylings were perfect for Miss Peregrine…, and with a script courtesy of Jane Goldman (X-Men: Days of Future Past, Kingsman: The Secret Service), all the signs were good that the movie would be as dark and strange and captivating and exciting as the novel.

And for the most part it is. Ultimately, it’s the adaptation that doesn’t work entirely, with Goldman unable to pin down the main storyline, and fumbling with the subtext relating to humans as monsters during World War II (it’s no coincidence that Abe is a Polish Jew and a survivor of the ghetto, and that the hollowgasts’ name sounds like something else from World War II). With the main ingredients of Riggs’ tale broadened at first and then allowed to carry on broadening, the movie ends up being only half as rewarding as it could have been. Things begin well with Stamp’s genial yet firm Abe trying to keep Jake safe from the threat of the Wights and the Hollowgasts, but once Abe dies there’s an uneasy switch from Abe and Jake to Jake and Franklin, and their trip to Wales. Goldman rushes things along and soon Jake is getting to know the likes of Emma Bloom (Purnell), who is lighter than air and has to be weighted down; Millard Nullings (King), an invisible boy; and Olive Abroholos Elephanta (McCrostie) who can set things alight just by touching them.

It’s this stretch of the movie that is the most enjoyable, as Jake (and the viewer) gets to know everyone, and the idyllic, if repetitive, nature of the children’s existence is explored. There are terrific performances from all the child actors playing the Peculiar Children of the title, and a wonderful performance from Green as their guardian. With her probing stare and knowing smiles, Green is the movie’s ace in the hole, and the movie misses her energy whenever she’s off screen. Once things start to unravel and Mr. Barron gains the upper hand, the movie pauses to regroup itself, and heads for a crowd-pleasing finale at the end of Blackpool Pier that involves a riotous showdown between Hollowgasts and animated skeletons á la Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Along the way it abandons any notion of cohesion and continuity, and its attempts to make sense of the time loop/time travel conundrum the Peculiars and Jake find themselves in are brief and inconclusive (and baffling to anyone not paying full attention).

But while the script tries to work out how best to tell the story, and in doing so deviates from Riggs’ original halfway cliffhanger-ish ending, the movie is rescued by Burton and his striking visual compositions and the movie’s darkly exuberant set design and decoration. This is, at times, a sumptuous movie to watch, and Burton’s trademark gothic flair is well in evidence as he guides the viewer through a series of imaginative and impressive sequences that more than adequately show how good a fit for the material he is. But again, when the story has to take centre stage it’s often weak and lacking focus, though to be fair to Goldman she is trying to cram an awful lot into a two hour movie, and as good as she is as a screenwriter, when the source material is as detailed as it is, it’s unsurprising that some of the good stuff is going to be overlooked or a way for it all to fit in isn’t explored with any vigour.

Alongside Burton’s efforts, those of Green, Jackson, Stamp and Purnell are most welcome, with Jackson’s pantomime performance proving weirdly appropriate. Fans of the novel will be surprised to find that this is, unless a sequel is green-lit, a stand-alone movie with only a couple of nods to the book’s original ending. Does this work? The answer is impenetrable, either way. Fans and supporters of the novels will be disappointed that this isn’t the beginning of a series, and newcomers will most likely have wanted to spend more time getting to know all the peculiar’s; all in all, there’s something for everyone, just not as much for avid fans of the book.

Rating: 7/10 – with its script proving too wayward, and feeling like it was rushed (or hastily rewritten at some point prior to filming), Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children entertains in fits and starts; and yet it’s hugely enjoyable when Goldman and Burton’s sensibilities meet in the middle, and there’s more than enough on display to justify the movie’s being seen by as many people as possible, so perhaps this is one adaptation where advance knowledge of the plot isn’t necessary… or desirable.

Mr. Church (2016)

05 Saturday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Breast cancer, Britt Robertson, Bruce Beresford, Cooking, Drama, Eddie Murphy, Natascha McElhone, Pregnancy, Relationships, Review, Tearjerker

D: Bruce Beresford / 104m

Cast: Eddie Murphy, Britt Robertson, Natascha McElhone, Xavier Samuel, Lucy Fry, Christian Madsen, Mckenna Grace, Natalie Coughlin, Madison Wolfe, Lincoln Melcher

In 1971, something unusual happens to single mother Marie Brooks (McElhone) and her ten year old daughter Charlotte (known as Charlie) (Coughlin): they find they have a cook. His name is Henry Joseph Church (Murphy), and he is effectively a legacy from the man who was Charlie’s father. Employed to look after Marie and Charlie after her father’s death, Mr. Church – as he likes to be called – has been paid to look after them for the next six months. The timescale is important because Marie has breast cancer and has been given that amount of time to live, though she hasn’t told Charlie any of this.

At first, Charlie doesn’t want Mr. Church in their home. But once she tastes his cooking, she slowly comes around to the idea that having him there during the day is a good idea. He brings books into the home that Charlie begins to read, and he makes things easier for Marie. But after six months, Marie is still alive, and is still alive again in six years’ time, though much sicker by now. When Charlie (Robertson) is asked to the prom by the boy she likes, Owen (Samuel), she doesn’t want to accept because she’s afraid Marie won’t be alive by then, but Marie confounds expectations and even helps her decide on a dress. Throughout all this time, Mr. Church has been the rock that both women have relied on; the only thing that bothers Charlie is that after six years, she still doesn’t know anything about him.

But one night she sees him going into an infamous club called Jelly’s. She doesn’t say anything, and soon after she goes off to Boston University, helped in part by savings Mr. Church has put aside for her. There she meets new people, works hard, and winds up pregnant. Unsure of what to do, she returns home, and with her mother no longer alive, she goes to Mr. Church’s home. He lets her stay on the condition that she continues to respect his privacy. She agrees, but later on, the temptation to find out more about him, leads her to break that one rule and in doing so, bring an end to their relationship.

Putting aside the Beverly Hills Cop retread that was made for TV in 2013, Eddie Murphy hasn’t appeared in a movie since A Thousand Words (2012). In fact, since he made the execrable Norbit (2007) his career has consisted of four theatrical releases, and five outings as Donkey (from Shrek) on both the big and the small screen. Once upon a time, Murphy was the world’s biggest movie star. Now he’s rarely seen at all, and when he is, there’s precious little fanfare. Mr. Church is a movie that has slipped under most people’s radar, and it’s indicative of both Murphy’s place in the acting firmament, and it’s likely reception, that this movie isn’t being promoted more heavily. It’s a small movie, to be sure, but one that has a lot more going for it than might be readily expected.

For starters, there’s Murphy’s portrayal of Henry Joseph Church. Henry is a quiet, proud man, though he has his demons (as Charlie discovers when she stays with him). Murphy focuses on the man’s quiet demeanour, his initially reserved, almost calculating approach to being Marie and Charlie’s “cook” (he becomes so much more to both of them), and the way in which his relationships with them give his life a greater meaning. And even when he’s dealing with his inner demons, what is more impressive in terms of the character is the alacrity with which he can forget about those demons and continue to be supportive of Charlie and Marie. Murphy doesn’t strike a false note throughout (though an angry outburst nearly takes the shine off, coming across as an awkward line reading of an equally awkward piece of dialogue). Like a lot of comedians, Murphy is a fine, dramatic actor, and here he judges the character and the emotional links to the narrative with quiet aplomb, grounding a movie that at times can strike the viewer as being cloyingly sentimental.

But Murphy is the antidote to that feeling, even when he’s involved in some of that overly sentimental material. Mr. Church is a guardian angel, someone who knows exactly what to do in any given situation, and the former star of movies such as The Golden Child (1986) and Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), effortlessly redeems himself for some of the dreadful movies he’s made in the last twenty, thirty years. Using a neutral expression for the most part, Murphy still manages to evoke feelings and responses in the viewer that a lot of actors would struggle to achieve across a movie lasting five times as long. And in conjunction with Britt Robertson, he’s found someone who can match him in terms of displaying their character’s emotional stance without resorting to an exaggerated acting style. Mr. Church is a tearjerker, and one that works best because of the understated way in which its characters are played.

That’s not to say that the movie is entirely successful, though. Given the era it all takes place in, you could be forgiven for thinking that at some point, racism will rear its ugly head, but there’s not one scene that addresses the issue directly. This makes it seem as if the story is taking place in an historical vacuum, an idea that is further compounded by the realisation that Mr. Church doesn’t have a family of his own, or even friends, and his emotional well-being is entirely dependent on the white family he works for. There are moments where this is highlighted, and awkwardly, leaving the viewer with the suspicion that any such notions were ignored or removed during the movie’s production. But equally, it’s a measure of the movie that as race isn’t an issue for Marie and Charlie, then their acceptance of Mr. Church is a valuable lesson in how to make a movie about just the characters and their relationships, and not about any extraneous issues such as race or creed.

Some may find that the movie is overly and severely sentimental, but this, for once, isn’t a bad thing. There are several moments where the emotional message behind the movie is turned on like Xmas lights, and while these moments do stick out from the rest of the material, it’s a tribute to veteran director Bruce Beresford (and his cast) that they don’t overwhelm the episodic storyline, or prove too off-putting. There are also times when the characters avoid talking to each other, and almost in deference to Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men (1992) when he tells Tom Cruise’s character that he “can’t handle the truth”. These moments can be frustrating, but by the time you’ve registered the frustration, the story has moved on and the “danger” has passed.

Having previously directed the likes of Driving Miss Daisy (1989) and A Good Man in Africa (1994), Beresford is a good choice for the director’s chair, adding layers of subtlety when required, and allowing emotional outbursts to happen without their feeling staged, or pulling the viewer out of the narrative. He keeps things very simple throughout, and doesn’t allow the various “tragedies” that occur during the narrative to define the characters, leaving them free to grow in their own way. Even secondary characters such as Madsen’s Army vet with a drink problem are allowed to shine at various points in the movie, and while some of them may feel extraneous to things, they all have their place in driving the story forward. It all helps Mr. Church to become more than just a deft “feel-good Samaritan movie”, and more of an ode to (mostly) uncomplicated, mutually dependent and rewarding relationships.

Rating: 7/10 – with its simple message, and even simpler approach to the material, Mr. Church might seem, at first, to be lacking in depth, but thanks to good performances from Murphy and Robertson, and pertinent direction from Beresford, the movie has more to offer than meets the eye; easy to watch and even easier to admire for what it gets right, Murphy’s latest outing won’t win many awards or attract great swarms of viewers, but it is worth seeing as a reminder that he’s still a very talented actor indeed.

Poster(s) of the Week – Witchfinder General/The Conqueror Worm (1968)

02 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

American International Pictures, Horror, Michael Reeves, Poster of the week, The Conqueror Worm, Tigon, Vincent Price, Withchfinder General

When movies are released with an alternative title, often there’s a new poster created to go with the change of name. And sometimes the new poster proves to be better than the original (though more often there’s no difference either way). In 1968, the British production company Tigon released a movie based on a novel by Ronald Bassett called Witchfinder General. The movie was directed by wunderkind Michael Reeves, and starred Vincent Price in what would come to be regarded as one of his very best performances.

The above poster was used in the UK, and while it has a lot to say for itself in terms of the activity presented within its frame, it’s not the best example of a horror movie poster from the period. The title is shown in large block capitals, but more in the style of an historical epic rather than the low-budget horror movie it’s actually about. And the image of Vincent Price, with its backdrop of rising flames, isn’t the best representation of the actor you’re ever likely to see, what with his beady eyes and protruding lower lip. There are – unfortunately – lots of other areas where the poster design lacks imagination, and in the case of the woman on the left hand side with her arms raised who looks like she’s wearing a bikini, quality control. There’s a riot of activity going on across the image, and while some of it – the burnings, Price’s black-cloaked figure – are relevant to the movie, there’s far more that isn’t, and there’s a sense that a cast of thousands has been assembled to match the intensity of the material (completely unlikely, though, as a plan to shoot the Battle of Naseby was scrapped as it would involve hiring too many extras). And then there’s the typeface, underlined in red for no reason at the top, taking up the bottom fifth of the poster, and leading to the central images being squashed between the two. In short, it’s a messy, jumbled effort and does the movie it’s advertising no favours.

In the US it was a whole different ballgame (as it usually is). Co-producers on the movie, American International Pictures, wanted to play up the presence of Vincent Price and link it in to the various Edgar Allan Poe movies they’d produced earlier in the decade. Of course, Reeves’ tale of Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General takes place roughly two hundred years before Poe’s career made him famous, so there can’t be any kind of connection at all, but AIP were the kind of company that wouldn’t let a simple thing like an historical mismatch get in the way of selling a movie. And as for that title, well it’s not very witch-y, is it?

The title change does have a certain charm, and on its own it’s an ominous enough combination, but it doesn’t adequately reflect the content of the movie. The poster though, for all its adherence to the lie that this is an adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe tale, gets much more right than its British predecessor. The admonition to stay home with your children if you’re too squeamish is straight out of low-budget horror movie marketing for the time, but for once, it’s not false advertising. Reeves’ approach to the material was to highlight the sadism and the cruelty of the period, and while the UK censors took umbrage at some of the scenes in the movie and they were removed, US viewers saw the movie in a version that was virtually intact. And instead of a pouting, disapproving-looking Price staring out at you, AIP went with a mangled skull with one eye still in place, its tousled, straw-like hair like roots growing out of the skull itself. It’s definitely an arresting image, and one that isn’t constrained by the more orderly typeface seen at the top left and along the bottom of the image. It’s also the kind of horrifying image you might see in an illustrated version of Poe’s stories, and not a tale of witch-hunting in 17th century England. But it works, almost completely, with the only caveat being that its depiction of the crosses Hopkins’ victims are tied to, don’t match up to those in the movie (and really, that’s just a minor gripe at best).

So, to be clear, AIP took a movie they’d co-financed, they changed the title, they made it look and sound like another of their Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, they added an image with no relevance to the content of the movie at all, and they did it with full awareness that they were misrepresenting their own movie. And yet – it works, and more powerfully than Tigon’s version. Maybe there’s a lesson in there, somewhere, but one thing’s for sure, sometimes artistic licence really is the way to go.

Agree? Disagree? Feel free to comment.

The Library Suicides (2016)

01 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Catrin Stewart, Drama, Dyfan Dwyfor, Euros Lyn, Fflur Dafydd, Literary adaptation, Murder, National Library of Wales, Review, Ryland Teifi, Suicide, Thriller, Twins, Wales, Y Llyfrgell

Original title: Y Llyfrgell

D: Euros Lyn / 87m

Cast: Catrin Stewart, Dyfan Dwyfor, Ryland Teifi, Sharon Morgan, Carwyn Glyn

Twins Ana and Nan (Stewart) both work in the archive section of the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. Their mother, Elena (Morgan), is a famous author who has raised her daughters by herself. Ana is the creative, more outgoing twin, while Nan is the dependable, more introverted one. Their lives are orderly, well-managed and maintained, and their work appears to be all they have outside of their relationship with their mother. But all that changes when Elena commits suicide by jumping from a second story window at their home. With Ana and Nan both present in her dying moments, Elena says that “it was Eben”.

Eben (Teifi) was once a student of Elena’s who in the time since her death, has been granted access to her papers, and is intending to write her biography. The papers are kept at the National Library, in a vault room below ground. Late one afternoon he arrives at the Library to begin work on the biography. He’s shown in by security guard Dan (Dwyfor). Soon the Library closes, and once all the other visitors have left, Ana and Nan begin to carry out a plan they’ve hatched to kill Eben for causing the death of their mother.

Along with Dan, there’s another guard called Glyn (Glyn). The twins offer them both coffee laced with crushed sleeping tablets. Glyn succumbs, but Dan rejects the offer. Ana tempts him with alcohol (also laced with crushed sleeping tablets) but he only drinks enough to pass out for a short while. While both men are “out of action”, the twins confront Eben in the vault room. They pull guns on him, tie his hands together, put a noose around his neck, and make him stand on a chair. But as they pull away the chair, Dan – who has woken up and has seen what’s happening on a security monitor – cuts the power to the building. The lights go out, there’s a crash followed by a gunshot, and in the moments that follow, both Ana and Nan become aware that their plan for revenge isn’t going to go as well as they’d planned…

The Library Suicides is a bit of a rarity. It’s a Welsh thriller where the entire cast speak Welsh throughout (there’s the odd English phrase or word, but it still leaves the cast speaking Welsh for ninety-nine percent of the running time), and it’s largely set in the actual National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. There’s also something of a mystery to be solved, as the circumstances surrounding Elena’s death aren’t as clear-cut as they seem, and in particular, Eben’s involvement – if any – in what happened that day. As Ana and Nan put their plan into action, Eben’s behaviour, allied with some unexpected interventions by Dan, ensure that Ana and Nan have to improvise quite a bit, and in doing so, learn more about their mother than they suspected could be true.

Adapted from the novel by Fflur Dafydd (who also provides the screenplay), The Library Suicides is a smart, intriguing psychological thriller that makes good use of its unique location – it’s like a maze in there – and manages to keep the viewer guessing for most of its relatively short running time before it conforms to thriller conventions and reveals all. Before then, though, it throws in a few deft twists and turns, and keeps its focus firmly on Ana and Nan as they try to contain the fallout from Dan’s cutting off the power, and also contain their own feelings as they both learn about and reveal things about their mother.

In the hands of experienced director Euros Lyn – better known for his TV work on shows such as Daredevil, Broadchurch and Doctor Who – The Library Suicides is a dour but imaginative thriller that features a terrific dual performance from Stewart (who is herself a twin in real life), an ominous score courtesy of Dru Masters, and sterling cinematography from Dan Stafford Clark that captures the chilly atmosphere of the Library and the claustrophobic nature of the material as the characters become more and more trapped by the decisions they’re forced to make. One of the main reasons for how good the movie is lies at the door of Stewart, who at first makes it very difficult for the viewer to tell Ana from Nan and vice versa, but as the movie progresses, slowly but surely, she expertly defines both twins’ individual psychology, and in the process, gives two awards-worthy performances.

The mystery surrounding Elena’s death, and the meaning behind the phrase, “it was Eben”, is slowly but surely revealed as the movie progresses, and the deep, dark secret lurking behind it all (while it will be obvious to some viewers) is handled with care throughout. Lyn resists the temptation to make more out of it than there is, making it all more low-key than a lot of other movies would feel comfortable with. By doing so, Lyn ensures the viewer is more attentive and more invested than in a lot of other, similar thrillers out there, and he sprinkles some misdirection here and there to keep audiences on their toes.

This being a modern day thriller, there’s blood to be spilled, and though the physical demands of the production are entirely evident on the screen, it’s often the movie’s subtext that has the advantage of making more of an impact as the movie progresses. The movie is as much about redacted memory and the suppression of feelings than it is about revenge for an undisclosed crime, and Dafydd’s script keeps sight of all this even when said blood is being spilled. In particular it’s what the twins remember that carries emotional and dramatic weight, and again, both Lyn and Stewart are more than up to the challenge of revealing just enough to keep viewers enthralled and wanting to see what happens next. In the end it’s only a last-minute reveal that proves unnecessary, and while it may be clever in the context of what’s gone before, it does the narrative no favours and seems tacked on for effect – which it doesn’t need to do.

Rating: 8/10 – deliberately paced, and with the look and feel of a “Nordic noir”, The Library Suicides is a movie that gives its characters solid reasons for what they do, and never short changes them or the audience as a result; Stewart’s performances are compelling, and Lyn’s direction expertly juggles the visual demands of those performances, while also negotiating the spaces within the National Library with vigour and aplomb, making this one night shift that’s hard to forget.

Monthly Roundup – October 2016

31 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

400 Days, Action, Africa, Alexander Skarsgård, Christoph Waltz, Crime, David Yates, Documentary, End of a Gun, Greg Kwedar, Historical drama, John Dower, Johnny Simmons, Keoni Waxman, Louis Theroux, Malin Buska, Margot Robbie, Matt Osterman, Michael Nyqvist, Mika Kaurismäki, Monthly roundup, My Scientology Movie, Queen Kristina of Sweden, Reviews, Samuel L. Jackson, Sarah Gadon, Sci-fi, Steven Seagal, The Girl King, The Legend of Tarzan, Thriller, Transpecos

The Legend of Tarzan / D: David Yates / 110m

Cast: Alexander Skarsgård, Samuel L. Jackson, Margot Robbie, Christoph Waltz, Djimon Hounsou, Jim Broadbent, Simon Russell Beale, Ben Chaplin

Rating: 3/10 – “meh”; woeful only just about covers how bad this movie is, from the wooden performances, to the haphazard scripting, to Yates’s casual engagement with the material, and all the way to the creaky use of CGI to simulate the African backgrounds – at no point does The Legend of Tarzan ever feel as if it has any intention of putting any real effort into things.

400 Days (2015) / D: Matt Osterman / 91m

Cast: Brandon Routh, Dane Cook, Caity Lotz, Ben Feldman, Tom Cavanagh, Grant Bowler, Dominic Bogart, Fernanda Romero, Sally Pressman, Mark Steger

Rating: 4/10 – four astronauts are locked inside a chamber designed to simulate the timescale of a planned mission, and the psychological effects of such a journey, but as the simulation nears its finish, the quartet find that things aren’t entirely what they seem; a mystery thriller that doesn’t need its sci-fi trappings (and where the mystery is unengaging), 400 Days plays out like an old Outer Limits episode but without the succinctness that show could provide, all of which leaves the viewer trying hard to make sense of what’s going on, and trying equally hard to decide whether or not they should be bothered about it all.

The Girl King (2015) / D: Mika Kaurismäki / 106m

Cast: Malin Buska, Sarah Gadon, Michael Nyqvist, Lucas Bryant, Laura Birn, Hippolyte Girardot, Peter Lohmeyer, François Arnaud, Patrick Bauchau

Rating: 5/10 – the story of Queen Kristina of Sweden (Buska), who in the ten years she ruled her country, did her best to bring enlightenment and peace for everyone, and who fought against her advisors’ insistence that she marry and secure her throne for the future; reminiscent of the Euro-pudding movies so prevalent in the late Seventies and throughout the Eighties, The Girl King lacks a coherent shooting style that isn’t helped by Hans Funck’s scattershot approach to the editing, but it does keep things admirably simple (if not too simple at times), and remains unexpectedly watchable thanks to Kaurismäki’s determined effort to convert Kristina’s reign (and her presumed lesbianism) into historical soap opera.

My Scientology Movie (2015) / D: John Dower / 99m

With: Louis Theroux, Marty Rathbun, Marc Headley, Tom De Vocht, Jeff Hawkins, Andrew Perez, Rob Alter

Rating: 7/10 – Louis Theroux, intrepid (and annoying) documentarian turns his attention onto Scientology, and attempts to understand why the organisation is so litigious and defensive about its practices; Theroux teams up with ex-Scientology bigwig Marty Rathbun to learn about what goes on behind the scenes, but succeeds largely in having childish spats with one of the organisation’s “security” team (very funny indeed), while organising a filmed representation of a meeting where Scientology leader David Miscavage threw a major tantrum, all of which leaves My Scientology Movie feeling arid for long stretches and not quite as illuminating as Theroux might have hoped.

Transpecos (2016) / D: Greg Kwedar / 86m

Cast: Johnny Simmons, Gabriel Luna, Clifton Collins Jr, Julio Oscar Mechoso

Rating: 5/10 – three Border Patrol guards find themselves in trouble with a Mexican cartel when they stop the wrong car at a checkpoint, and learn that one of them is in even deeper trouble than anyone knew; Transpecos makes good use of its New Mexico locations, and the opening twenty minutes point towards the movie being a tense, tightly constructed thriller, but sadly it soon degenerates into an unconvincing, meandering collection of scenes that are often dramatically inert, and which stretch the narrative in a variety of ineffective ways that it can’t recover from.

End of a Gun (2016) / D: Keoni Waxman / 87m

Cast: Steven Seagal, Florin Piersic Jr, Jade Ewen, Ovidiu Nicolescu, Jonathan Rosenthal, Alexandre Nguyen, Claudiu Bleont

Rating: 4/10 – retired DEA agent-cum-“ghost” Michael Decker (Seagal) rescues a stripper (Ewen) from her abusive boyfriend (by killing him) and finds himself helping her steal €2m of the man’s money – which doesn’t go down well with his drug czar boss; another Romanian-shot quickie from Seagal that keeps his stunt double, his running double, and his walking double in gainful employment, End of a Gun is made bearable thanks to a good performance from Piersic Jr, and Waxman’s ingenuity when shooting low-budget shootouts, but otherwise it’s business as usual, which is to say, pretty awful (and the less said about ex-Sugababes member Ewen, the better).

I, Daniel Blake (2016)

30 Sunday Oct 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Dave Johns, Drama, Employment Support Allowance, Hayley Squires, Heart attack, Jobseeker's Allowance, Ken Loach, Palme d'Or, Paul Laverty, Preview

D: Ken Loach / 100m

Cast: Dave Johns, Hayley Squires, Briana Shann, Dylan McKiernan, Kate Rutter, Micky McGregor

As the opening credits of I, Daniel Blake are displayed, the viewer gets to hear a conversation that the movie’s title character (Johns) is having with a “healthcare professional”. The “healthcare professional”, a woman, is asking a series of questions that have nothing to do with Daniel’s recent heart attack. As he gets more and more frustrated with her, it becomes clear that he’s already become stuck in a welfare system that can’t deviate from its proscribed formulas and rules. The end result is a situation where Daniel’s health is such that his doctor and his consultant have advised him that he shouldn’t work until he’s fully recovered. But he’s unable to claim the Employment Support Allowance (ESA) that would tide him over until he’s better; he’s just not unwell enough as judged by the criteria. And with the so-called “healthcare professional” not having followed up about his health with his doctor, Daniel finds that if she had, he would have had enough points.

But he’s stuck with having to appeal the decision, which isn’t as straightforward as he expects. While he waits for the appeal to be heard, he has no choice but to claim Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA), which is for people who are fit and looking for work. Needing money to live on but now finding himself stuck in a twilight world where strict rules often fail to help an individual’s needs, Daniel soon discovers that getting any kind of financial support is much, much harder than it looks (or should be). A carpenter who’s mostly worked on building sites for forty years, and who has been recently widowed, Daniel isn’t computer literate (instead he’s “pencil literate”, as he puts it) and struggles to fill in the requisite forms online. His efforts to look for work – because he hasn’t got any evidence of doing so that the Job Centre will accept – are looked upon unfavourably, and he’s threatened with sanctions if he doesn’t make more of an effort.

Through all of this, Daniel meets and befriends a young, single mother of two called Katie (Squires). Having had to move from London to Newcastle in order to live somewhere better than a homeless persons’ hostel, Katie is also struggling for money. Daniel helps her out where he can, mostly in a practical way by helping out around her new home, and in the process he bonds with her two children, Daisy (Shann) and Dylan (McKiernan). They support each other, their unlikely friendship borne out of their frustrating efforts to get the UK welfare system to help them in the short term. But even their friendship is put to the test by the system’s lack of support, and when Katie makes a decision that has (potentially) wider consequences, it causes a rift between them, and both find themselves alone again.

A few years ago, Ken Loach announced his retirement from movie making. He’d made Jimmy’s Hall (2014), and wasn’t sure he could continue with the same amount of confidence in his abilities as he had before. It was an understandable feeling, but one that many people hoped Loach would overcome. Obviously, he has. But if anyone had any doubts that Loach wasn’t capable of maintaining his passion for movies, and the making of them, then I, Daniel Blake is the movie to dispel those doubts. Laced with Loach’s trademark vitriol when dealing with blinkered authority, this is a movie that shows Loach has lost none of his skill in dissecting the ills lurking at the heart of British society, and the ways in which the under-privileged are treated with such disdain.

Along with regular screenwriter and collaborator Paul Laverty, Loach has fashioned a caustic tale of intransigence within the UK welfare system, and in doing so, has highlighted some of the more farcical aspects of said system. There’s a scene where Daniel, having given his CV to a number of potential employers, receives a phone call from one of them offering him a job. But because his ESA appeal is still pending he’s unable to take up the offer. This causes the employer to brand him a timewaster and someone who’d rather take benefits than work. It’s an untenable situation, and Daniel has no answer to it except to continue to plough through the mountain of red tape that seems designed to keep him from getting any money at all.

Likewise, Katie has her own problems in getting any JSA. New to the city she misses her first Job Centre appointment by minutes and is told she can’t claim any money because she’s late. There’s no attempt to allow for extenuating circumstances, and when she protests she’s asked to leave; no one is interested in hearing her out. Loach uses examples like these to show just how unyielding and implacable the system is, and how it keeps knocking people down at every opportunity. If, at the start of the movie your understanding of the UK welfare system is that it isn’t as flawed as everyone makes out, then that understanding will be completely washed away by the movie’s end.

Loach’s passionate, didactic approach is, however, as heavy-handed and lacking in subtlety as ever. He and Laverty pile on the problems and the knockbacks and the condescension and the impugnity of uncaring authority figures with little regard for the drama of the piece. The movie is relentless in this respect, adding to Daniel’s woes in almost every scene, and by the end it’s an exhausting experience just watching a once proud man pushed to the limit of what he can endure. Katie also suffers, her efforts to keep her children safe and healthy meaning that she has to experience the opposite. With Loach and Laverty keen to prove just how terrible being dependent on the welfare system can be, their efforts to show just how bad it all is soon feels like they’re trying too hard. It shouldn’t take long for the viewer to understand and appreciate what they’re saying – and within the first twenty minutes, easily – but they can’t resist making it worse the longer the movie continues.

This makes the movie sound like a distressing polemic, a one-sided view of life in 21st century Britain. And it is, but thankfully it’s leavened by a streak of mordaunt humour that makes things more tolerable, and which allows Loach to lighten up from time to time and acknowledge that no matter how bad things get, even the most downtrodden of people can find something positive to fall back on. Daniel and Katie have each other, and their shared experiences help make things more bearable for both of them. Loach allows them (and the viewer) hope – and that’s the right thing to do. How else does anyone survive being treated so badly by a system that’s supposed to be helping them?

Loach is ably supported by two commendable performances from Johns and Squires. Johns is a comedian making his feature debut, and he gives a beautifully judged portrayal of a man falling into despair but who’s determined not to give in. His plaintive, frustrated expressions speak volumes, while his attitude and physical presence in certain scenes are deliberately downplayed to show how much his will to fight has been whittled away. Squires is equally impressive, making Katie an entirely believable character whose focus is always on her children, and who is willing to make whatever sacrifice she can to keep them with her. There’s a scene in a food bank that is easily the movie’s best moment, and Squires is magnificent, letting Katie’s fears and desperation overwhelm her to heartbreaking effect.

In the end, much of I, Daniel Blake isn’t “enjoyable” in the traditional sense, and it’s not meant to be, clearly. Loach is on a mission to highlight the absurdity and misery that go hand in hand in today’s Britain if you’re seeking government assistance, and he more than succeeds, even if at times it’s at the expense of narrative consistency (the one authority figure Katie encounters who doesn’t add to her woes, only lets her off the hook because if he didn’t, the script wouldn’t be in a position to allow her to make the decision that causes a rift between her and Daniel), or credible characterisations (one Job Centre operative is so callous and uncaring it’s beyond caricature). But again, Loach isn’t exactly known for his subtlety, but he is aware of the message he’s sending, and in that respect, it’s good to have him back after his “so-called” retirement.

Rating: 8/10 – Loach’s second movie to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes – the first was The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) – I, Daniel Blake is a powerful, depressing, enraging, and yet touching movie made by a director who can still get angry at the injustice he sees being meted out to Britain’s social underclass; whatever your view on Loach’s politics, one thing is undeniable: he’s a director, who at the age of eighty, is still capable of making vital, socially relevant movies after nearly fifty years, and who shows no sign of (really) letting up just yet – and that’s something we should all be grateful for.

Question of the Week – 29 October 2016

29 Saturday Oct 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Ouija: Origin of Evil, Ouija: The Devil's Game, Plagiarism, Poster, Question of the Week, You Will Kill

This week’s question is a really, really simple one, but also one that relies on people’s awareness of Lulu Wilson’s character and appearance in Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016). The poster below is for the UK re-release on DVD of You Will Kill (2015) (aka Ouija Summoning). Take a look at it, then ask yourself this week’s Question of the Week (see below).

Should the makers of Ouija: Origin of Evil sue for copyright infringement?

Happy Birthday – Winona Ryder

29 Saturday Oct 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

A Scanner Darkly, Actress, Career, Happy Birthday, The Crucible, The House of the Spirits, The Iceman, The Last Word, Winona Ryder

Winona Ryder (29 October 1971 -)

In the late Eighties, Winona Ryder appeared in two iconic movies: Beetlejuice (1987) and Heathers (1988). She wouldn’t be twenty for another three/four years. Having that much success so early in her career could now be seen as a bad thing, as the Nineties increasingly showed that fame and fortune were having an adverse effect on her. Dogged by depression and anxiety, Ryder continued to make movies that were incredibly diverse, and which featured varied, challenging performances. But like many of her contemporaries, once the new century arrived she became less and less of a box office draw, and her choice of roles retained their variety but not the critical or commercial acclaim of her earlier work. Nowadays her appearances are more sporadic, though well-received. In particular, her role in Black Swan (2010) and her work on the TV series Stranger Things (2016) have reinforced the idea that she is still as talented as she was in her heyday. Here are five more reminders of just how good an actress Winona Ryder is.

The Crucible (1996) – Character: Abigail Williams

Nicholas Hytner’s adaptation of Arthur Miller’s acclaimed play (and with a script by Miller himself) features a stunning performance from Ryder as the lover of Daniel Day-Lewis’s character who, out of envy, sparks a witch hunt in the town of Salem. Ryder is mesmerising as the vindictive Abigail, and she more than holds her own against the likes of Day-Lewis, Joan Allen, and Paul Scofield, imbuing her character with an angry, yet damaged vulnerability that more than justifies her vengeful actions.

A Scanner Darkly (2006) – Character: Donna Hawthorne

In Richard Linklater’s bold, inventive movie, which features the second fully integrated use of rotoscoping (basically tracing over original movie footage), Ryder is a dealer of Substance D, a drug that has gotten 20% of the American public hooked on it. Keanu Reeves’ undercover government agent becomes emotionally entangled with her, and it’s Ryder’s quietly subtle performance that helps guide the viewer through some of the more labyrinthine aspects of the narrative, and (hopefully) out the other side.

The House of the Spirits (1993) – Character: Blanca Trueba

Based on the novel by Isabel Allende, this arresting look at love and politics during the turbulent years of the military dictatorship in Chile sees Ryder recalling her character’s memories as a child and then following that same character’s adult life, and all the difficulties experienced at both times. It’s a largely supporting role, but Ryder is more than capable of providing a fully rounded character who has an increasing impact on the story the movie is telling. It’s also a testament to Ryder that this was her third costume/historical drama in a row – after Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and The Age of Innocence (1993) – and she retains the virtues that allowed her to give such great performances in those movies as well.

The Iceman (2012) – Character: Deborah Kuklinski

As the unsuspecting wife of real life hitman Richard Kuklinski (Michael Shannon), Ryder gives an understated, yet compelling performance that acts as a credible counterpoint to Shannon’s more expressive role. This was another reminder that Ryder is a fine, intuitive actress when given the right role, and she matches her co-star for intensity when the part requires it, leaving the viewer in no doubt that whatever troubles have plagued her in the past, she’s still more than capable of bringing a somewhat stock character to life.

Square Dance (1987) – Character: Gemma Dillard

In only her second appearance in a movie, Ryder plays a thirteen year old who, having lived in the country with her grandparents (Jason Robards and Jane Alexander) for most of her life, accepts an offer from her mother to go and live with her in the city. She gives a sweet, confident performance in a movie that deserves to be reassessed as it approaches its thirtieth anniversary, and she displays a maturity in the role that few other actresses at that age could muster.

Mini-Review: The Late Bloomer (2016)

28 Friday Oct 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Brittany Snow, Comedy, J.K. Simmons, Johnny Simmons, Kevin Pollak, Literary adaptation, Maria Bello, Puberty, Review, Romance, Sex, True story

D: Kevin Pollak / 94m

Cast: Johnny Simmons, Brittany Snow, Maria Bello, J.K. Simmons, Kumail Nanjiani, Beck Bennett, Paul Wesley, Blake Cooper, Jane Lynch, Sam Robards

Peter Newmans (Simmons) is essentially a sex therapist, but one with a difference: his job is to convince sexaholics that they should channel their sexual energy into other avenues, such a hobby or work. In essence he’s encouraging his patients to be as celibate as he is. Yes, that’s right, Peter is celibate, and has reached the age of thirty without ever having sex, or even a girlfriend. He’s attracted to his neighbour, would-be chef Michelle (Snow), but she’s already in a relationship, and anyway, he wouldn’t know what to say or do even if she wasn’t. Luckily, Fate steps in when Peter collapses and is rushed to hospital. There he’s told that he has a tumour that has been pressing on his pituitary gland, and this has been the cause of his asexuality. But once the tumour is removed, puberty is going to hit him like a ton of bricks.

And so it proves. Initial attempts by his friends, Rich (Nanjiani) and Luke (Bennett), to get Peter laid don’t work, and it’s not until he wakes up one morning with an erection that Peter finally gets to experience the pleasures of, to begin with, excessive masturbation. It also changes the way he views his work, and he begins to encourage his patients to fully embrace their sexual desires, a change that causes concern for his boss, Caroline (Lynch), who has Peter booked on several publicity spots (he’s written a book on how to avoid “unnecessary” sex). But when Michelle becomes single, Peter’s continued inability to properly express his feelings for it – now thanks to the hormones raging inside him – leads him to alienate her, and also Rich. With only his long-suffering parents (Bello, J.K. Simmons) to turn to, Peter has to find a way of becoming the responsible adult – the man – he would have become if he’d gone through puberty at the right time.

A comedy that wants to be raunchy and sweet at the same time, The Late Bloomer is based on the book, Man-Made: A Memoir of My Body by Ken Baker. So, in essence it’s a true story (Baker did suffer from the same kind of tumour that Peter does), but this is a movie where the approach and the way the material has been handled, will inevitably lead the viewer to wonder if Baker’s experiences have been fairly or even halfway accurately transferred to the screen. Because this is a movie that wavers throughout in its efforts to tell a coherent story. It wants to be a raunchy comedy for the most part, and there are laughs to be had, but this is at odds with the romantic aspects of the material, and the non-existent sympathy for Peter and his situation.

With the movie lacking a clear focus, scenes come and go without any connection to each other, and Simmons is left looking and sounding like a complete doofus. As the movie progresses it becomes clear that the screenplay (assembled by five – count ’em – five screenwriters) and the director are not in sync, and despite several efforts by the cast, are never likely to gel no matter how hard they try. This leaves the movie looking disjointed and poorly assembled. There’s a funny, rewarding, and charming movie to be made out of Baker’s memoir, but this isn’t it.

Rating: 4/10 – a movie that strives to be liked but stumbles at almost every turn in its efforts to do so, The Late Bloomer wastes a ton of potentially humorous situations by ditching subtlety at every opportunity; Pollak’s feature debut as a director, he might be better off choosing any future projects by making sure they have a more polished script, and a better sense of where they’re going (and how to get there).

10 Horror Sequels/Remakes to Avoid in 2017

27 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

2017, Horror, New movies, Previews, Remakes, Sequels

With Halloween and all things spooky just around the corner – unless you’re the BFI and you have the chance to screen John Carpenter’s seminal Halloween (1978), which you do, though not on 31 October, but on the 17th instead – here are ten horror movies you would do well to steer very, very clear of in 2017.

1 – Friday the 13th – After their dreadful remake of the original Friday the 13th (1980), back in 2009, Platinum Dunes try again with another version. Originally planned for release this year, the movie has been put back to October of next year, and with very little in the way of a plot or storyline to be had, this seems to be a production that’s either being made as part of a contractual obligation, or as another attempt at making a quick buck off of Jason Voorhees’s fan club.

2 – Rings – First there was the Japanese original, Ringu (1998), then the inevitable US remake, The Ring (2002), along with sequels from both countries. And now Sadako Yamamura is back, crawling out of another (the same?) well, and killing more people who’ve watched her doing so. The trailer for the movie shows events happening on board a plane, which begs the question: how is everyone on board going to receive a phone call seconds after the video has ended?

3 – World War Z 2 – The first movie started off strong then fell to pieces in its final third, but made enough money to (financially) warrant a sequel. Scheduling problems saw director J.A. Bayona leave the project early on, and little is known – surprise, surprise – about the plot except that it follows on directly from the first movie. Brad Pitt is back, but right now there’s no word on who will be joining him, and with so much up in the air at the moment, there’s a good chance that the movie won’t even see the light of day.

4 – Saw: Legacy – Proving yet again that if you’re making a horror movie series, and you include the words The Final Chapter in what is supposedly the last in the series, then all it means is that a further sequel will turn up eventually. Saw: Legacy is a continuation of the series, but one that nobody really wants or needs. With Jigsaw having been killed off long ago, let’s hope this one doesn’t get bogged down in trying to connect itself with previous outings, and tries at least to do something different, though the phrase, “Let’s play a game”, now seems a little ironic.

5 – Amityville: The Awakening – If ever there was a property that needed to be torn down and never built on again, then it’s 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York. Not because of the terrible, tragic events that occurred there in November 1974, but because it might stop movie makers from flogging this particular cinematic dead horse (this is the ninth movie overall). That it’s attracted a crop of well-known names – Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gabriel Mann and Bella Thorne – might encourage some viewers, but with none of the previous entries having garnered much critical support between them, this is unlikely to be any different.

6 – Annabelle 2 – The first movie somehow managed to gross over $250m at the international box office, so a sequel was inevitable, but the basic plotline makes it all sound more confusing than it needs to be, as it seems to provide another origin story for the doll with the rosy cheeks. It’s in the hands of David F. Sandberg (Lights Out), but this is unlikely to stray too far from its The Conjuring roots to be any more effective or challenging (except maybe to watch).

7 – Suspiria – The original, superbly directed by Dario Argento, is a classic Italian horror, and a movie that is a perfect illustration of the phrase “lightning in a bottle”. Argento was never able to replicate or even come close to the power of his now-signature movie, and there’s no indication here that director Luca Guadagnino will manage to come close to it either. And as if to further handicap the movie’s chances of being anywhere near as good as the original, the producers have seen fit to hire Chloë Grace Moretz – a seriously bad move; haven’t they seen Carrie (2013)?

8 – Insidious: Chapter 4 – Another horror sequel where the basic plot is unknown (even to the makers?), this at least brings back Lin Shaye as troubled psychic Elise Rainier, so there’s a degree of quality attached to this movie, but with this many trips to the well already, the likelihood of returning scribe and creator Leigh Whannell fashioning anything really scary is limited. Consistently good box office returns have gotten the series this far, but that’s not necessarily a good thing.

9 – Halloween: The Night Evil Died – With Laurie Strode no longer around to fend off or foil her tortured brother, Michael Myers, this outing (the eighth, ignoring Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1983) and the two sequels made by Rob Zombie) has no option but to fall back on the time honoured tradition of there being a wider family presence for Michael to kill in a variety of semi-cool ways. The series ran out of steam a long while back, and as with every other movie on the list, it seems that the producers haven’t caught on yet.

10 – Hellraiser: Judgment – It’s hard to believe perhaps – and especially because most of the previous entries have gone straight to video – but this will be the tenth Hellraiser movie, and in keeping with that particular milestone, much is being promised by writer/director Gary J. Tunnicliffe. But this has the air of a movie being made to ensure Dimension Films retain the franchise rights, and if history has anything to say about that particular motive, then this will be very disappointing indeed.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: