Tag Archives: Biography

Gotti (2018)

21 Thursday Mar 2019

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D: Kevin Connolly / 109m

Cast: John Travolta, Spencer Lofranco, Kelly Preston, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Stacy Keach, William DeMeo, Leo Rossi, Chris Kerson, Chris Mulkey

Where to begin…

It’s not just that Gotti is a bad movie – and it really, truly is – it’s that watching it you begin to wonder if anyone working on it had any idea of how misguided and inept it all was, from the opening scene that sees Travolta as Gotti breaking the fourth wall and beginning to tell his story from beyond the grave, to the final scene, where Travolta as Gotti again speaks to camera and brags that you’ll never see anyone like him ever again. These scenes are bad enough, what with their eulogising of Gotti and his flamboyant look, but they’re overwhelmed by the sheer awfulness of what unfolds between them. This is a movie that doesn’t so much shy away from being impartial, as get into an Indy 500 car and race off into the distance at top speed in order to do so, and it’s not long before you realise that the script – by cast member Leo Rossi and Lem Dobbs – has been constructed to lionise Gotti and his life of crime. In other, more capable hands, the contemporary footage of Gotti supporters praising him in the wake of his death in 2002, would have been used to make an ironic statement about his public persona; instead they’re used for exactly what they are: idolaters remembering (for them) a great man.

In terms of a wider ineptitude, Gotti struggles to get anything right. Having decided to impose a non-linear narrative on itself, the movie plays like a rough cut where scenes have been jumbled together and still need to be assembled in an effective, relatable order. It’s a lucky coincidence if one scene follows another and there’s a connection between them, and many are short, leaden and lacking in relevance. Gotti‘s editor, Jim Flynn, fumbles reaction shots, drains scenes of any energy or flow, and makes what should have been one of the movie’s standout set pieces, the execution of Gambino Crime Family boss Paul Castellano, into an exercise in how not to depict a shootout. It’s a mess of randomly stitched together shots that leaves the viewer with no way of knowing who is shooting who, or how many times, or where from (and that’s without the CG blood spurts). In fairness, Flynn’s job may have been made more difficult thanks to a lack of coverage provided by the movie’s director, but even if that is the case then it serves only as confirmation that Connolly, whose previous outing, Dear Eleanor (2016), is well worth seeking out, is here either out of his depth or hasn’t learnt very much during the course of his twenty year plus directing career.

It would be some consolation if the performances offered a respite from the dreary depictions of backroom betrayals, the travails of John Gotti Jr (Lofranco) – here made out to be something of a paragon of virtue for turning his back on his criminal lifestyle – and several random killings that are meant to mean something but never do. However, Travolta aside (this became a personal project designed to give a boost to his ailing career), it appears that the rest of the cast decided that because of the script’s propensity for volumes of exposition, and its lack of a coherent story, as well as its wafer thin characterisations, that a minimum amount of effort should be expended. Travolta tries too hard, and grinds his teeth a lot in that way that he has when he wants his character to be taken seriously, and Connolly does nothing to rein him in or modulate the performance. (Spare a thought though for Lofranco, taking on the role of Gotti Jr and having to create the character from scratch; as far as the script is concerned he’s a blank page.) In the end, the script gives Gotti an elegiac send-off, providing further evidence that this is far from the gritty exposé viewers might be expecting, and instead something that could easily pass as a celebration of a smartly dressed murderer – and without the judgement.

Rating: 3/10 – a terrible movie about a terrible man, Gotti sinks to new levels of silliness, stupidity and inadequacy, and works best as an object lesson in how not to put together a true crime biography; fully deserving of whatever criticism can be levelled against it, it’s a movie that feels like a patchwork quilt of bad intentions and low ideas, and which routinely undermines itself at every turn, leaving it looking and sounding like the trainwreck of all trainwrecks.

A Private War (2018)

28 Thursday Feb 2019

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D: Matthew Heineman / 110m

Cast: Rosamund Pike, Jamie Dornan, Tom Hollander, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Faye Marsay, Stanley Tucci, Greg Wise, Corey Johnson, Jesuthasan Antonythasan, Raad Rawi

Marie Colvin (Pike) is a journalist and war correspondent working for the Sunday Times. She goes where most other journalists wouldn’t even think of going, but her work is highly personal and highly praised. However, in 2001, while in Sri Lanka, her return journey from a meeting with the Tamil Tigers is ambushed and Marie is wounded in the attack, losing the sight in her left eye. Back home she adopts an eye patch, and after a period of recovery, throws herself back into the fray by visiting Afghanistan and Iraq, and despite suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. She also meets freelance photographer Paul Conroy (Dornan), and they form a dedicated partnership, as they document the effects war has on the people of these countries, and the atrocities they have had to endure. But continued exposure to civil wars and the suffering of others has made Marie erratic and unpredictable, and her editor, Sean Ryan (Hollander), is concerned about her continuing to travel to war zones. But then, in 2012, comes news of the humanitarian crisis in Syria, and what’s happening in the city of Homs, and Marie determines to see for herself how bad it is…

Adapted from the article Marie Colvin’s Private War by Marie Brenner, which was published in Vanity Fair in 2012, A Private War begins (and ends) with a quote from Colvin: “You’re never going to get to where you’re going if you acknowledge fear.” It’s an appropriate message, as the movie shows just how fearless Colvin was when she was in the middle of a war zone, or if her life were in immediate danger. Her fierce determination and selfless behaviour allowed no time to be afraid; that was for when she was at home, and dealing with the nightmarish images that she’d seen over the years, and which continued to haunt her. At one point, Conroy states what may well have been the truth: that Colvin was addicted to her work, and that being waaaay past the front line in any given conflict was what she lived for. Brave or foolish, the movie doesn’t judge. Instead, Arash Amel’s psychologically complex screenplay, and Matthew Heineman’s tightly controlled direction highlight the ambiguity of emotion that prompts someone to only truly feel alive when they’re in the midst of death. And the ways in which Colvin rejects any concern for her safety shows just how addicted she became.

To show all this, the movie doesn’t attempt to lionise its heroine, or sugar coat the fact that Colvin could be abrasive and demanding. She also had a drink problem, but Amel’s script acknowledges this and then moves on; it doesn’t define her, her passion for the truth of an issue does. All of this is brought out by an incredible career-best performance from Pike. Tough, vulnerable, overwhelmed, arrogant, devastated, removed, passionate – Pike is all these things and more as Colvin, and she shows an understanding of the journalist’s mindset that adds an emotional resonance to the material. When Colvin’s story reaches Homs, the movie manages to be both hopeful and triumphant even though the outcome is inevitable, and Pike plays the part as if Colvin is invincible. This makes the ending all the more heart-rending, but in keeping with the serious tone adopted throughout, any melodrama is avoided, and Heineman’s matter-of-fact approach to the material wins out. Given the intensity and power of Pike’s performance, the rest of the cast don’t fare quite as well, and secondary characters such as Colvin’s best friend, Rita (Amuka-Bird), and late arrival lover, Tony (Tucci), pop up now and then to little effect, while some of the London-based scenes border on perfunctory, but otherwise this is a gripping exploration of one woman’s need to make a difference when no one else could – or would.

Rating: 8/10 – an intelligent, fascinating movie about an altogether different form of addiction, A Private War is sobering and thoughtful, and not afraid to reflect the horrors we inflict on each other in the name of religion or ethnicity or just plain hatred; visceral and uncomfortable in places, and as determined not to apologise for this as Colvin would have been, the movie acts as a reminder that heroism comes in many different forms.

On the Basis of Sex (2018)

26 Tuesday Feb 2019

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D: Mimi Leder / 120m

Cast: Felicity Jones, Armie Hammer, Justin Theroux, Sam Waterston, Kathy Bates, Cailee Spaeny, Jack Reynor, Stephen Root, Chris Mulkey, Gary Werntz, Francis X. McCarthy, Ben Carlson

It’s the 1950’s, and recently married Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Jones) has no intention of being a housewife. Instead, and like her husband, Martin (Hammer), she wants to be a lawyer. She attends Harvard Law School but finds herself treated poorly because of her gender. When Martin gets a job at a legal firm in New York, Ruth tries to transfer to another university, but is refused due to existing though male-centric rules. Ruth transfers anyway and comes top of her class, but when it comes to working for a law firm, no one wants to employ her because she’s a woman; in the end she takes a position as a law professor at Rutgers Law School. When Martin tells her about a tax law case his firm is dealing with, she realises that the issue – that of a male caregiver (Mulkey) being denied tax deductions because of his marital status – is a clear infringement of gender equality. Ruth takes on the case, and with the aid of the ACLU, takes it all the way to the Supreme Court…

Ah, the humble biopic… Somewhere in Hollywood, there must be a template for screenwriters to use when assembling a biography, one that they should follow almost to the letter. There will be moments of adversity, a general struggle to be recognised or achieve fame/fortune/a place in history/all three that is overcome by sheer perseverance (and a surplus of self-belief), and a number of setbacks for the main character that help them develop more as a person. All these, and more, are present and correct in On the Basis of Sex, the second of two movies released in 2018 about Associate Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (the other is a documentary, RBG). As with many movies that are “based on a true story” or “true events”, there are liberties taken with Ginsburg’s life and career, and those liberties go to ensure that the screenplay adheres to the biography template. What this means as a whole is that the movie is sleekly efficient at exploring the basics of Ginsburg’s early life and career, but horrendously awkward at making any of it look and sound like it ever happened to real people. It all looks perfectly fine and sincere, but underneath all that sincerity, the movie is as hollow as an Easter egg.

It’s a movie built almost entirely on the idea that what really happened needs to be improved on dramatically, otherwise why would anyone watch it? So Ginsburg suffers gender-based discrimination over and over again before she gets a chance to upset the legal apple cart and show her true mettle in front of a trio of male Supreme Court justices, and the audience gets to watch a series of encounters where she caves under the sexist rhetoric of pretty much every other male in the movie that’s not her husband. Of course, she comes good in the end, but the wait just isn’t worth it. Even the good work of Jones and Hammer isn’t enough to offset the predictable nature of Daniel Stiepleman’s by-the-numbers screenplay, or Leder’s equally perfunctory direction. Whether this approach to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life, and her efforts to ensure legal parity for everyone truly works, will depend largely on the viewer’s acceptance of this approach, and how prepared they are to overlook the arch theatrics on display, as well as the number of dramatic clichés trotted out in order to make the movie feel as anodyne as every other big screen biography. Like RBG, the movie makes use of the famous quote by Sarah Moore Grimké: “I ask for no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” Perhaps a better version would be to ask our movie makers to have more faith in their real life characters and not to assume that their idea of what should have happened is an improvement on the real thing.

Rating: 6/10 – tiresome, and with little to say that isn’t obvious or bordering on condscension, On the Basis of Sex wastes an opportunity to tell a fascinating story with verve and vigour, leaving the viewer to wade through a series of loosely connected scenes that tell a familiar story of triumph over adversity; given the importance of Ginsburg’s efforts, and the impact that they’ve had, it’s a shame that this fictionalised version of her life and early career doesn’t live up to the momentous nature of what she achieved.

RBG (2018)

22 Friday Feb 2019

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D: Julie Cohen, Betsy West / 98m

With: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Arthur R. Miller, Nina Totenberg, Clara Spera, James Steven Ginsburg, Jane C. Ginsburg, Gloria Steinem, Shana Knizhnik, Irin Carmon, Sharron Frontiero, Stephen Wiesenfeld, Lilly Ledbetter, Orrin Hatch

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Ruth Bader earned a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University; it was there that she met her husband-to-be, Martin Ginsburg. Stints at Harvard Law School and Columbia University led to her becoming a law professor. It was during this period of her life that RBG (as she has come to be known) encountered various and wide-ranging examples of gender inequality. Recognising the unfairness of the situation, in 1972 Ginsburg co-founded the Womens Rights Project at the ACLU; over the next four years she argued six gender discrimination cases before the US Supreme Court – and won five of them. In 1980 she was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and stayed there until she was appointed to the Supreme Court as an Associate Justice in 1993; she has remained in the post ever since. Because of her work as a legal advocate, litigator, and judge, Ginsburg has become something of a cultural icon in the last couple of decades, and an inspiration to young women around the globe…

A documentary about an octogenarian Supreme Court justice whose fame as a trailblazer for gender equality within the framework of the US legal system has been overshadowed in recent years due to a meme that referred to her as The Notorious R.B.G., Julie Cohen and Betsy West’s affectionate yet sobering movie is a tribute to Ginsburg’s tenacity over six decades. As RBG explores the legal, political, and social upheaval that Ginsburg was involved in during the Seventies and Eighties, it becomes abundantly clear just how much of an impact she had, and just how much has changed thanks to her efforts. That she remained as focused and determined as she did, while having a successful marriage and raising two children (James and Jane), and earning the respect and admiration of her male peers as well, is an amazing feat that reinforces just how well regarded she has become, and why it’s so well deserved (and how many associate judges of the US Supreme Court can say they’ve appeared, albeit very briefly, in both Deadpool 2 (2018) and The LEGO Movie 2 (2019)?). And she remains entirely self-effacing, a fact that makes watching RBG all the more interesting and enjoyable.

What the movie does so well, aside from ticking off most of her considerable achievements over the years, is to find out who the woman behind the meme really is, and thanks to an astute combination of archive material and modern day interviews, Cohen and West have assembled a documentary that does just that. Ginsburg emerges as a quiet, introspective woman with a good sense of humour, a stronger sense of natural justice, and fiercely independent in her thinking. She appears relaxed on screen, and in many ways curious about being the subject of a biographical movie, further traits that make her endearing to those who’ve never heard of her before, and which reinforce her stature as a right-thinking liberal for those who have. Her marriage to Martin is given a lot of emphasis, and while there’s an argument that she wouldn’t have been as successful in her career if he hadn’t been her bedrock (which she acknowledges), it’s this decades spanning love affair that provides the emotional core of a movie that might have otherwise been much drier. That said, it’s a heartfelt mix of serious historical reportage and sometimes surprisingly goofy humour, and provides viewers with an insight into the mind of someone who truly did have an impact on the way two generations of American women are now able to live their lives.

Rating: 8/10 – a stirring and enjoyable documentary that highlights the incalculable influence that one individual can have when they are determined enough, RBG is a sincere, intelligent, and captivating movie that serves as a reminder that it wasn’t just racial equality that was being fought for during the Sixties and Seventies; there might not be too much in the way of criticism of Ginsburg, but then this isn’t a fawning hagiography either, settling as it does for serving up large swathes of her life, and leaving the viewer to judge her more controversial actions – such as her pre-election criticism of Donald Trump – on their own merits.

All Is True (2018)

10 Sunday Feb 2019

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D: Kenneth Branagh / 101m

Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench, Kathryn Wilder, Lydia Wilson, Hadley Fraser, Ian McKellen, Jack Colgrave Hirst, Sam Ellis, Gerard Horan

In 1613, following the destruction of the Globe theatre by fire, William Shakespeare (Branagh), having been away from his family for most of the last thirty years, decides to return to his home in Stratford-upon-Avon, and there live out the rest of his life. His arrival isn’t as well received as he would like: his wife, Anne (Dench), treats him as a guest, while his daughter, Judith (Wilder), is angry at his presumption that he can just come home and nothing should be said about it. Shakespeare finds himself finally mourning the death of his son Hamnet seventeen years before, but this brings out an unexpected animosity from Judith (who was Hamnet’s twin). Meanwhile, his eldest daughter, Susanna (Wilson), is trapped in a loveless marriage to Puritan doctor John Hall (Fraser). She has an affair that nearly leads to public ruin, while after several disagreements with her father over what a woman is for, Judith pursues a relationship with local wine merchant, Tom Quiney (Hirst). There is scandal in their relationship as well, but before it can threaten to ruin Judith’s standing in the local community, a revelation about Hamnet causes Shakespeare’s memory of his son to be changed forever…

In using the alternative title for The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth, All Is True opens itself up for close inspection of its claim, and inevitably, is found wanting. As much as any historical biography can be “true”, Branagh’s take on Shakespeare’s final years (from a script by Ben Elton), labours under the necessity of finding enough material to fill in the blanks of what we know already – which isn’t that much. And so, we have a movie that makes a handful of educated guesses as to the events surrounding Shakespeare’s self-imposed retirement, but can’t quite come up with a reason for it. For the most part, the script is more concerned with the problems affecting his daughters, while the great man himself is reduced to being a secondary character, one seen creating a garden to honour his son’s memory, or indulging in melancholy conversations with the likes of visiting guests the Earl of Southampton (McKellen), and Ben Jonson (Horan). They’re odd scenes to have, as both see Shakespeare downplaying his genius while his visitors do their best to boost him up. And the scene with Southampton is there simply to support the theory that his sonnets were the product of a homosexual infatuation; all very possible but at odds with the tone of the rest of the movie.

Indeed, the overall tone is one of overwhelming grief and sadness as Shakespeare attempts to deal with the loss of Hamnet. Whether seen in moments of contemplation, or through the verses he wrote before his death, Hamnet is the ghost that haunts everyone, and Shakespeare’s grief is tainted by the false recollections he has of him. This allows Branagh the director plenty of opportunities to let Branagh the actor look sad and distant, though mostly it makes him look as if he’s spotted something far off in the distance but can’t quite work out what it is. Still, it’s a good performance from Branagh, and he’s given able support from Dench and the rest of the cast, but in the end, Elton’s script rambles too often from subplot to subplot without ever connecting them in a cohesive, organic fashion. And Shakespeare himself, as a character, is only saved from being a complete dullard by virtue of Branagh’s efforts in front of the camera; there’s more fire and intensity from Wilder’s defiant Judith. A curious mix then of the effective and the banal, and tinged with soap opera moments that are out of place, it’s bolstered by Zac Nicholson’s naturalistic cinematography (all the night-time interiors used candlelight only), and James Merifield’s expressive production design.

Rating: 6/10 – not as definitive as it might have wanted to be, nor as engrossing as the subject matter should have merited, All Is True stumbles too often in its efforts to be intriguing, and features a seemingly endless array of establishing shots that seem designed to pad out the running time for no other reason than that they look pretty; anyone looking for an introduction to Shakespeare the man should look elsewhere, while those who are curious about his later years would do well to treat the movie as an interpretation of events rather than a retelling of them.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)

04 Monday Feb 2019

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D: Marielle Heller / 106m

Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Richard E. Grant, Dolly Wells, Ben Falcone, Gregory Korostishevsky, Jane Curtin, Stephen Spinella, Christian Navarro, Anna Deveare Smith

New York, 1991. Author Lee Israel (McCarthy) is struggling with a combination of writer’s block, alcoholism, and financial troubles. Her last book wasn’t well received, and her agent (Curtin) is unable to get her an advance for her latest project, a biography of Fanny Brice. In order to make ends meet, Lee sells a letter she received from Katharine Hepburn to a local bookseller, Anna (Wells). Anna’s chance remark that she would have paid more for “better content”, allied with the discovery of a letter by Brice while doing research, leads Lee to forging and selling letters by well known literary figures. She’s successful at first, but in time suspicions are raised, and Lee is blacklisted. To combat this, Lee enlists the aid of her friend, Jack Hock (Grant), an aging British actor who is as much down on his luck as she is. But though he too is initially successful at selling Lee’s forgeries, it’s not long before she becomes aware that the FBI is involved, and actively talking to the people she’s sold to. And then Jack is arrested…

What would you do to maintain your fame and (minor) fortune? How far would you go to retain the idea that your work is still relevant when the evidence points otherwise? And how would you go about it without jeopardising what little respect you still have amongst your peers? These are all questions asked by Can You Ever Forgive Me?, a sobering yet archly humorous exploration of the ways in which bitterness and a misplaced sense of entitlement can lead someone to abandon their principles in pretty much a heartbeat. What makes Lee’s fall from grace so ironic is that she was arguably more successful as a forger than she was as a legitimate writer. It’s another aspect of the cautionary tale that made up most of Lee’s later life that the screenplay – by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty – correctly focuses on. With its bittersweet coda, that sees one of Lee’s forgeries regarded as real (and priced accordingly), there’s an argument that what she did was her best work of all, and she herself would have probably agreed (at her trial, she relays the fact that her time spent forging literary letters was the best time of her life). Was she aware of this while she wrote them? It’s possible, and if she did, it goes some way to answering a good number of the questions the movie raises about her.

In raising these kinds of questions, the movie is helped immensely by the performance of Melissa McCarthy. An actress who is in many ways hampered by her comedy persona, McCarthy is a revelation here, unlikeable yet likeably tenacious, arrogant yet without cause, and undermined by her own insecurities. It’s a tremendous portrayal that allows Lee to appear vulnerable, and unerringly caustic at the same time, while giving McCarthy her best role so far (and one that enables us to forget her other two movies of 2018, Life of the Party and The Happytime Murders). Partnered with an equally unforgettable performance from Richard E. Grant – the relish with which he tackles his role is infectious; no wonder he’s already won eighteen awards – McCarthy channels unexpected depths as Lee, and makes her more than just a hack with a drink problem and a (deliberate) shortage of friends. If the movie does Lee any kind of injustice, it’s in distancing itself from her being a lesbian, something that’s awkwardly, and unconvincingly, addressed through a tentative friendship with Anna. Otherwise, this is a tremendously unfashionable biopic about an unhappy, disreputable woman (and her equally disreputable sidekick) who seek to repair their fragile egos through lying to others, and themselves.

Rating: 8/10 – with a transformative performance from McCarthy, and astute, carefully layered direction from first-timer Heller, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a dark comedy that touches on some very serious topics while daring the viewer to like its main character; fascinating and smartly handled, it’s a movie you feel the real Lee Israel would have been happy with, as long as she got the right credit.

Free Solo (2018)

01 Friday Feb 2019

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D: Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin / 100m

With Alex Honnold, Tommy Caldwell, Sanni McCandless, Jimmy Chin, Mikey Schaefer

Climbing, whether it involves mountains, cliff faces, escarpments, or domes, is always a risky, sometimes highly dangerous endeavour, even for the professionals. Imagine though, if you took away any ropes or pitons or other safety equipment, and you attemptd to climb, say, a sheer cliff face using only your hands and feet to get to the top, how much more risky, or highly dangerous do you think that would be? If you’re not sure, then Free Solo is the movie that will provide a definitive answer (as if anyone really needs convincing). It introduces us to Alex Honnold, a professional rock climber who has become famous for his free solo ascents of sites such as Northern Ireland’s Fair Head, Mexico’s El Sendero Luminoso, and the Yosemite Triple Crown – Mt Watkins, El Capitan and Half Dome. For most people, these sites will mean nothing at all, but they are all genuinely challenging climbs that Alex Honnold has completed on his own, and without any equipment to help him. But there has always been one ascent that Honnold has always dreamed of conquering as a free solo climber: the 2,900 ft Freerider route of El Capitan. And on 3 June 2017, he set out to make his dream come true…

There are several moments in Free Solo where the camera adopts a vertiginous angle, and we look down on Alex Honnold as he carefully navigates his way across and over rock surfaces that look almost smooth and lacking in finger and toe holds. But while Honnold effectively clings to those rock surfaces, the image – whether it’s courtesy of a drone or one of the team of climber photographers organised by co-director Jimmy Chan – nearly always keeps his position in context with the wider surroundings. And that context is scary. If you suffer from vertigo, or have even the slightest fear of heights, then this movie is not for you. What Honnold does, and the danger that he puts himself in, is nothing short of both courageous, and insane. And yet, Honnold is a genial individual, likeable and passionate about what he does, and quite open about his feelings on a range of matters from his own shortcomings to when it might be time to call it quits. And even if he also appears to be someone who enjoys behaving like an outsider (he lives in a van and feels more comfortable there than in a plush hotel room), his personality is endearing, and he comes across as the nerdy kid at school who grew up to do something incredibly cool. It’s no surprise to learn that he has few friends outside of the climbing community, and it’s equally unsurprising that those he does have are fiercely supportive of him.

As to why Honnold is able to do what he does, there’s a fascinating segment where he undergoes an fMRI, and the results reveal that his amygdala, which governs our responses to fear and anxiety, isn’t entirely active. Honnold takes it all in his stride, and moves on to the next stage of his preparations to climb El Capitan. His focus is incredible, but more incredible still is the actual climb. As a feat of physical endurance, it’s unparalleled. As the cameras follow him through each of El Capitan’s treacherous sections, there are moments where it seems impossible that Honnold will be able to continue, and the viewer is likely to find themselves holding their breath in anticipation of the worst happening. This sense of dreadful anticipation is amplified by Marco Beltrami’s urgent score, and Bob Eisenhardt’s precision-tooled editing. And yet, Honnold makes it look easy, smiling at times with the enjoyment of it all, and rarely looking perturbed. The movie also takes time to explore Honnold’s relationship with his girlfriend, Sanni McCandless, and how both deal with the potential for harm in what Honnold does. Inevitably, when he sprains his ankle during his preparations, they react in different ways, he by carrying on regardless, she more quietly and with forbearance. It’s unexpectedly bittersweet moments such as these that help to make the non-climbing sequences as involving as the various ascents we witness.

Rating: 9/10 – with its breathtaking, awe-inspiring visuals and jaw-dropping imagery – there are several moments where it just seems impossible that Honnold has found a toehold or a rock to grip onto – Free Solo is the kind of documentary that impresses and impresses and impresses, and then impresses some more; a perfect blend of biography matched to a tribute to human endeavour, this is best watched on the biggest screen possible so that the impact of Honnold’s achievements can be appreciated all the more.

At Eternity’s Gate (2018)

30 Wednesday Jan 2019

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D: Julian Schnabel / 111m

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Rupert Friend, Oscar Isaac, Mads Mikkelsen, Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Neils Arestrup, Anne Consigny, Amira Casar, Vincent Perez

In 1888, and with his work not gaining the attention he feels it deserves, Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (Dafoe) decides to leave Paris for the rural town of Arles, where he can sketch and paint without all the distractions of city life to hinder him. Backed by his brother, Theo (Friend), Vincent lives in the Yellow House, and soon begins producing a prodigious amount of work. An extended stay by Paul Gauguin (Isaac) is, at first, welcomed by Vincent, but it soon becomes clear that the two men have very different ideas about art, and that the friendship Vincent is looking for – along with Gauguin’s respect – isn’t going to develop. Eventually, Gauguin leaves, and in a fugue state, Vincent severs his left ear. Now more isolated than ever, Vincent spends time being assessed as to the suitability of his being released from hospital, and though his behaviour, and the possibility of more manic episodes can’t be dismissed, he appears rational enough to return to Arles. But Vincent is still plagued by doubts and worries, and he eventually moves to Auvers-sur-Oise, where a tragic fate awaits him…

Covering the last two years of van Gogh’s life, At Eternity’s Gate (the title is taken from a painting the artist made during his last year) is not your average portrait of a suffering, unappreciated artist. Instead it’s a movie that does its best to make the viewer understand the depth of van Gogh’s passion for painting, and which does so thanks to a combination of Benoît Delhomme’s glorious cinematography, and director (and co-screenwriter with Jean-Claude Carrière and Louise Kugelberg) Julian Schnabel’s own artistic sensibilities. Here, the viewer is allowed to immserse themselves in the details of van Gogh’s paintings and sketches, and to gain a sense of the passion that drove van Gogh to create such a unique body of work. Whether it’s a still life, or a landscape, van Gogh’s commitment and drive is readily apparent, and Schnabel uses a number of visual and aural tricks to help us get inside the head of a man who wasn’t always comfortable with his own thoughts. This makes our engagement with van Gogh a little intrusive but also highly instructive: he’s a man tormented by his personal demons, but also an artistic genius because of them.

Van Gogh is played with a masterly brio by Dafoe, the actor displaying a rare skill in inhabiting the character, and in doing so, bringing him to life in ways that are surprising and profound. It’s as if Dafoe has found a way of channelling van Gogh’s own spirit and energy (and his mania), and as a result, it’s a performance that is often mesmerising for its empathy and understanding of just how tortured and driven van Gogh was. Dafoe is ably supported by Friend and Isaac, and there’s a tremendous supporting turn from Mikkelsen as the priest who gets to decide if van Gogh can be released from hospital (their one scene together is the movie’s highlight), but even with all these pin sharp interpretations, it’s Schnabel’s distinctive handling of the material that stands out the most. This is Schnabel’s own idea as to how van Gogh existed in the last two years of his life, and though it’s based on fact, the movie remains an imagining, an artistic depiction of how Schnabel views the van Gogh of that period – just as van Gogh depicted what he saw and made it his own. Often very, very beautiful to watch, and with much to say about the nature of art and its relation to us as individuals, this is easily Schnabel’s best movie since The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), and a fitting tribute to van Gogh and his work.

Rating: 9/10 – with a peerless performance from Dafoe, and Schnabel providing a masterclass in how to depict artistic expression on film, At Eternity’s Gate is a small miracle of arthouse movie making; moving and sincere, it’s the kind of endeavour that will always struggle to reach a wider audience, but for those who are willing to give it a try, it’s one of the most rewarding movies of 2018.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (2018)

24 Thursday Jan 2019

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D: Morgan Neville / 94m

With: Fred Rogers (archive footage), Joanne Rogers, John Rogers, Jim Rogers, Tom Junod, Junlei Li, Joe Negri, David Newell, François Clemmons, Nick Tallo, Yo-Yo Ma, Margaret Whitmer

For someone whose primary career was in television, Fred Rogers wasn’t its biggest fan when he first encountered it at his parents’ home in 1951. Originally planning to enter the seminary – he was eventually ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1963 – Rogers took up the challenge of television because he felt it could be a useful educational tool for children. After a stint in New York, Rogers went to work at Pittsburgh’s public television station, WQED. Soon he had co-created The Children’s Corner, an elaborate (for its time) puppet show that introduced many characters that would stay with him for the rest of his career. In 1963 he was contracted to work on a new show for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation called Misterogers; it was the first time Rogers appeared on camera, something that would prove to be a wise decision on CBC’s part. The show ran until 1967, at which point Rogers returned to Pittsburgh and began to develop Misterogers into a new programme for the National Education Television network. And that show was eventually called Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood…

One of the most amazing moments in Won’t You Be My Neighbor? occurs in the wake of a brief archive clip of Robert F. Kennedy. We next see one of Rogers’ puppet characters, King Friday XIII, ask what the word “assassination” means. It’s a tribute to Rogers’ skill as a children’s educator that he could raise such a topic on his show and discuss it in such a way that it became accessible to his young audience, and in a way that they could understand. Rogers would introduce other serious topics over the years, but as Morgan Neville’s heartfelt documentary explains, it was all in the context of helping children make sense of the world around them. Rogers was unique in this, and he was doing so at a time when children’s television was becoming overloaded with fast-paced cartoons and wacky character-based shows such as The Banana Splits. Intent on doing his own thing in his own time, Rogers wasn’t afraid to break the rules by being reflective or pensive, or even plain silent. And he did it all in a friendly, low-key manner that was also sincere, honest, and considering his religious background, refreshingly free of references to faith or spiritual matters. He was a remarkable man, and he had a remarkable effect on everyone around him, including (in another amazing moment) Senator John Pastore.

In exploring the life and work of Fred Rogers, Morgan Neville has made a documentary that not only celebrates the man and his influence on millions of children, but places him in a very important historical context. The late Sixties and early Seventies were a tumultuous period in US history, and through the reminiscences of his wife Joanne, and others who worked with him at the time, Rogers’ determination not to leave children out of what was happening in the world is brought sincerely and honestly to the forefront. His shows were educational and entertaining, and enchanting too, their stripped-back simplicity still unequalled to this day. What also comes across is just how likeable he was, and how some of his own fears and concerns were expressed through his puppet characters, a way for the man himself to make sense of the world. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is a potent, enervating documentary that packs several emotional wallops during a run time that doesn’t feel rushed (like Rogers’s shows), and which ends on a perfect grace note. In honouring the man, Neville’s movie, like Rogers himself, also honours all those children he had such a profound effect on. And that’s an amazing achievement…

Rating: 9/10 – one of the best movies of 2018, and in any category, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is a beautifully observant and wonderfully poignant look at a man whose impact on children and their emotional welfare and development can’t be underestimated; snubbed by this year’s Academy Awards – what is wrong with them? – this is genuinely moving in places, and a fitting tribute to Fred Rogers, the zip-up sweater man.

Colette (2018)

23 Wednesday Jan 2019

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D: Wash Westmoreland / 111m

Cast: Keira Knightley, Dominic West, Denise Gough, Fiona Shaw, Eleanor Tomlinson, Ray Panthaki, Al Weaver, Julian Wadham, Shannon Tarbet, Aiysha Hart, Jake Graf, Robert Pugh

In France in 1892, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, “Gabri” (Knightley), is a young woman whose father (Pugh) served in the army with renowned playwright and author “Willy”. Living in the quiet village of Saint Serveur, Gabri has led a sheltered life, so when she and Willy marry and she moves to Paris, the life he leads and his social circle prove something of a disappointment; it’s not the life she expected. Also unexpected is Willy’s carefree way with money – they’re always broke – and his fondness for other women. But being in Paris has awakened Gabri’s gift for writing, and though Willy is initially critical of her work, when bailiffs start calling and it looks as if they have no other choice, he convinces her to write a novel based on her school days. Published under his name, the novel is a runaway success, and is soon followed by two more, both equally as successful. But while Willy is happy to reap the fame and fortune, and keep Gabri’s talent hidden from everyone else, it’s not long before Gabri – now calling herself Colette – decides that remaining anonymous isn’t what she wants – or deserves…

A heritage picture through and through, Colette gives Keira Knightley yet another opportunity to prove that when it comes to costume dramas, there’s something about them that brings out the best in her. Beginning the movie in long pigtails and with a gauche demeanour that highlights Gabri’s inexperience of the world, Knightley continually adds layers to the character that allow her to grow in front of the viewer, and to stake a place in our hearts. It’s not a flamboyant performance, and it’s not designed to overwhelm the other actors or the material. Instead, Knightley shows the quiet determination and increasingly fierce will that Gabri develops as she transitions from average country girl to gifted literary icon. As she battles her husband’s prideful arrogance and sexist beliefs, Colette emerges as the woman Gabri was meant to be, and seeing Knightley navigate the narrow social and emotional pathways of the time highlights again her strengths as an actress. There’s an intuitiveness to her portrayal that’s impressive in the way that it allows her to shade her performance, and to make it subtler than the usual requirements of a costume drama. Quite rightly, she dominates the movie from start to finish.

Which is good news for the movie as a whole, as otherwise this is a period piece that adheres to the standard template of period pieces everywhere, and which does its best not to rock the boat in terms of visual flair, dramatic emphasis, the other performances, Westmoreland’s attentive yet straightforward direction, and Thomas Adès’ stalwart score. It’s not quite a pedestrian movie, but in terms of its structure, and its approach to the details of Colette’s life (and lifestyle), it’s very much a “safe” movie. Colette’s attraction to other women is played matter-of-factly, but the decision to do so, and for Willy to be unconcerned about it, robs the movie of any impact that these scenes could have generated. And many of the confrontations between Colette and Willy, though played in earnest and providing Knightley and West with moments to shine, are still part and parcel of what we’ve come to expect from a movie such as this one. It’s all handsomely mounted, with terrific attention to period detail, but it’s also too clean and sanitary, as if the characters’ prosaic surroundings had to match their constrained emotional outbursts. And for all the sense that the world Colette inhabited was on the cusp of change, here that change remains frustratingly under-developed, leaving the movie to make only a modest impact over all.

Rating: 7/10 – a first-rate performance from Keira Knightley helps Colette overcome a number of unfortunate production decisions that hamper the movie from achieving its full potential; still likeable, and with flashes of mordaunt wit that are deftly handled, it’s a movie that could have been richer and deeper and more layered, but which settles for telling a by-now quite standard tale of female empowerment.

Vice (2018)

16 Wednesday Jan 2019

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D: Adam McKay / 132m

Cast: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, Jesse Plemons, Tyler Perry, Alison Pill, Lily Rabe, Eddie Marsan, Justin Kirk, LisaGay Hamilton, Bill Camp, Don McManus, Shea Whigham, Stephen Adly Guirgis

In 1963, future vice president Dick Cheney (Bale) is working as a lineman because his alcoholism got him kicked out of Yale. Given an ultimatum by his wife, Lynne (Adams), to shape up and make something of his life, Cheney goes into politics, securing an internship at the White House during the Nixon administration. There he works for Nixon’s economic advisor Donald Rumsfeld (Carell). The two become friends (of a sort) and as the years pass, they both fall in and out of favour with the ruling elite, until during the Clinton era, Cheney becomes CEO of Halliburton, and Rumsfeld holds a variety of positions in the private sector. When he’s asked to be the running mate of George W. Bush (Rockwell) when Bush runs for president, Cheney sees an opportunity to occupy a unique position of power. But it’s in the wake of the terrorist attacks that occurred on 9/11 that Cheney sees his ambition begin to come to fruition. Without recourse to just cause, and ignoring his own intelligence agencies, Cheney orchestrates an unnecessary war in Iraq…

Although it’s perfectly well made, and intelligently constructed, Adam McKay’s foray into US politics lacks the urgency of his previous outing, The Big Short (2015), and the impact, with much of what we know about Cheney and his unrepentant manipulation of the facts post-9/11, still fresh in our memories. And it’s hard to be outraged by what Cheney did when the current incumbent of the White House abuses his position so appallingly (and deliberately), and on an almost daily basis. This leaves Vice at a bit of a disadvantage, with McKay’s screenplay laying it all out for us, but in a way that doesn’t feel fresh or surprising, but rather more like reportage. The facts are there, but the emotion isn’t, and this leaves the viewer in an awkward position: working out how to engage with a movie that should be hitting home quite forcefully, but which settles instead for telling its story too matter-of-factly for its own good (it doesn’t help that McKay lumbers his movie with having to stop and explain things such as the unitary executive theory… not the most exciting of topics). There’s also the hint of a longer movie as well, with incidents such as the Valerie Plame affair, and the accidental shooting of Harry Whittington, added to the narrative but ultimately carrying little or no dramatic weight.

And we never get to know Cheney the man, or his motives. Played with a marked reticence that makes Cheney look like a less amiable Chevy Chase, Bale is physically intimidating but often reduced to uttering grunts instead of sentences, and looking disinterested or dismissive. Cheney may have been a ruthless, calculating politician post-9/11, but a lot of the time he just looks like your average grumpy grandpa. Even the one good thing that Cheney did – retiring from public life in order to shield his daughter, Mary (Pill), from media scrutiny over being a lesbian – is tarnished by his later actions in supporting the political ambitions of his other daughter, Liz (Rabe). Rare moments such as these make Cheney appear more recognisably human, and not the unknowable cypher he is the rest of the time. All in all, it’s still a good performance from Bale, but it’s the likes of Adams and Plemons (as a fictional Iraq War veteran with an unlikely tie to Cheney) who make the material resonate more. Again, it’s intelligently constructed, and McKay sprinkles the narrative with some caustic humour to leaven the gloom, while DoP Greig Fraser ensures the sense of dirty deeds carried out behind closed doors is portrayed through tight close ups and the use of shadowy lighting. It’s a movie that speaks plainly about the issues it’s addressing, but sadly, a little too plainly to be effective.

Rating: 6/10 – dry and only fitfully engaging, Vice has the feel of a movie that’s telling its story as if everyone’s already been briefed and the movie itself is something of a formality; when a movie that seeks to recount seismic events in recent US history lacks immediacy and verve then something is very wrong indeed.

Hit So Hard (2011)

30 Friday Nov 2018

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D: P. David Ebersole / 103m

With: Patty Schemel, Eric Erlandson, Courtney Love Cobain, Melissa Auf der Maur, Terry Schemel, Larry Schemel, Nina Gordon, Roddy Bottum, Joe Mama-Nitzberg, Gina Schock, Alice de Buhr, Chris Whitemyer

Patty Schemel began playing drums at the age of eleven. Along with her brother, Larry, she formed her first band, The Milkbones, when she was fifteen. In the late Eighties, Patty played drums in a succession of bands, most of whom were fleeting and/or unsuccessful. Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain considered Patty as the replacement for the band’s original drummer; instead she became the drummer for Courtney Love’s Hole when their original drummer left. Between 1992 and 1998, Patty became an intrinsic member of the band, co-writing songs with Love and lead guitarist Eric Erlandson, and becoming recognised as one of the best female drummers around. However, substance abuse took its toll on Patty’s talent, and by the time Hole came to record their third album, her drug addiction contributed to her being replaced on the album by a session drummer brought in by the producer, and with Love and Erlandson’s agreement. In the wake of this, Patty devloped an addiction to crack cocaine and was homeless for a year. It was only through reaching out to Love that she was able to find her way back to being clean and sober…

Subtitled The Life and Near Death Story of Patty Schemel, Hit So Hard is a frank and – given the excesses on display – sobering account of how lucky Patty was to survive a period when drugs were as prevalent in her life as the music that inspired her. What is perhaps most surprising about Patty’s story is that her drug addiction wasn’t a reaction to the lingering effects of an unhappy childhood, or the fallout from a doomed love affair, or any of the myriad other reasons that some addicts confess to when they reach rock bottom. Instead, Patty was a victim of the drug culture that was tacitly condoned within the music industry, and which claimed the lives of people like Kurt Cobain. She and Cobain were good friends, and the movie reflects on their relationship (she lived with Cobain and Love for a time), while his death acts as a foreshadowing of Patty’s own potential for self-destruction. Even the death of Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff two months later – a blow that might have precipitated a further emotional downward spiral – is dealt with more readily than expected. Losing her role within Hole pushed Patty over the edge, but it was one she was already pre-disposed to fall from.

Though drug addiction and its consequences play a large part in Patty’s story, it’s the music that holds centre stage, from her early beginnings in bands such as Sybil and Doll Squad, to the heady days with Hole, and even now, playing with a variety of bands and teaching drumming. Interviews with some of Patty’s contemporaries show the high regard she has within the industry, and even now the other members of Hole acknowledge that the treatment she received on that third album wasn’t right; regret is the rightful order of the day. Through it all, Patty is an honest, engaging presence, certain and concise, and unafraid to confront her own failings. Having found a cache of Hi8 video footage she herself shot while on a world tour to support Hole’s second album, Patty has used this as the basis for the movie, and Ebersole has confidently weaved this and other archival footage into the non-linear narrative of Patty’s life, placing key moments at seemingly odd juxtapositions to other moments that are important (how she came out to her mother, Terry, happens much later in the movie than you might expect). Yet, as a whole, it works, and the reminiscences of Erlandson and Love offer valuable confirmations of Patty’s own recollections. What could have been another rock and roll tragedy is instead a tale of personal triumph, and one that eclipses the fame and fortune she had for six brief but incredible years.

Rating: 8/10 – what could easily have been presented – and promoted – as a cautionary tale, Hit So Hard (ironically a song title from that disastrous third album) avoids being a standard rock biopic, and tells its story simply and in a straightforward manner; there’s plenty of heartache and tragedy on display (and on many levels), but Patty Schemel’s level-headed approach to her own life and career makes hearing her story all the more rewarding and, yes, entertaining.

Whitney (2018)

14 Wednesday Nov 2018

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D: Kevin Macdonald / 120m

With: Cissy Houston, Bobby Brown, Michael Houston, Gary Houston, Mary Jones, John Houston III,  Donna Houston, Debra Martin Chase, Nicole David, Rickey Minor, Kevin Costner

Born into a family with a musical background – her mother, Cissy, was a backing singer for the likes of Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley, before embarking on a successful solo career – Whitney Houston was blessed with the gift of an amazing singing voice. As a youngster she sang in her local church, and at the age of nineteen she was signed to Arista Records; three years later she released her first album: it went to number one on the Billboard 200. Further success followed, and she became the only female artist to have seven consecutive number one singles in the US. 1992 was a banner year for Whitney, with her starring role in The Bodyguard, and her marriage to rapper Bobby Brown. She had a daughter, Bobbi Kristina, and continued success with albums and movies. But towards the end of the Nineties, it became clear that Whitney was struggling with a drug addiction that was interfering with her work, and affecting her voice. Public appearances showed a woman who seemed adrift from herself and unable to find her way back, and in 2012, aged just forty-eight, she died in tragic circumstances…

Watching Whitney, the latest documentary from Kevin Macdonald – Touching the Void (2003), Marley (2012) – you’re almost waiting for that moment, the one where the acclaimed singer took the wrong path, the point where it all started to go horribly, terribly wrong. But as the movie progresses, and several moments appear as if they could be the one, Macdonald reveals a sadder truth: the somber tragedy of Houston’s later life and career was caused by a number of problems that the singer never faced up to or properly dealt with. That’s not to say that Houston was the author of her own downfall, but instead she was someone who was taken advantage of in different ways – by her family, her friends, her various collaborators, her husband – and because these problems were both incremental and consistent, she found herself unable to deal with them. Escape through drugs was her only, perceived, option. As this becomes clearer and more obvious through the testimonies of the people who were with her during the Nineties, another, even sadder truth emerges: no one did anything to help her. Through all the highs and lows of Houston’s life, and despite all the attention she had, and all the success, her loneliness is made undeniably apparent.

Much has been made of the movie’s “revelation” that Houston was molested by her first cousin, Dee Dee Warwick, when she was a child, but Macdonald wisely acknowledges it and the anecdotal nature of its provenance, and doesn’t allow it to take up too much of the running time. He’s too intent on examining her life and career from the arms-length distance of an observer, allowing those who knew her to provide bias or clarity or their own self-interest as appropriate – except for Brown, who is challenged when he asserts that drugs had nothing to do with Houston’s life, or what eventually happened to her. But though the tragedy of Houston’s life is revealed in broad, unhappy swathes that are sometimes hard to watch (a comeback show in Australia is particularly hard to bear), this is still a celebration of a musical talent that touched the lives of millions around the world. Using archival footage, Macdonald shows the impact Houston had, and how deserving she was of the success she achieved. Her talent may have been a blessing and a curse, but what is certain from this sensitive and deftly assembled documentary, is that her talent is what truly defined her, and that’s something that a tragic end can’t erase.

Rating: 8/10 – an absorbing, entertaining, and thoughtful movie, Whitney makes no judgments about the singer’s life and career, or the choices she made, but it does highlight the various ways in which she lost control of her own destiny; a heartfelt mixture of joy and sadness, with powerful reminders of her prodigious talent, it’s a movie that also reinforces the notion that success and fame aren’t always precursors to happiness.

The Happy Prince (2018)

30 Tuesday Oct 2018

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D: Rupert Everett / 106m

Cast: Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Emily Watson, Colin Morgan, Edwin Thomas, Tom Wilkinson, Béatrice Dalle, Anna Chancellor, Julian Wadham, John Standing, Ronald Pickup

Oscar Wilde (Everett) has served his time in Reading Gaol and is living in France, supported by the kind attentions of one of his few remaining friends, Robbie Ross (Thomas). Suffering from ill health as a result of his stay in prison, Wilde is a shadow of his former self, wracked by torment and disillusionment, and his passion for writing exhausted. Against the better judgment and advice of his friends, including Reggie Turner (Firth), and his estranged wife, Constance (Watson), Wilde is reunited with the source of his downfall, Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas (Morgan). They live together, though the relationship is strained, and Douglas’s selfish behaviour begins to drive an irreversible wedge between them. When their families each threaten to remove their financial support for the pair, the relationship founders completely, and Wilde becomes a lonely figure wandering from café to café spending what little money he has on alcohol. With his health deteriorating even further, Wilde becomes incapacitated, and is forced to see out the remainder of his days in a dingy Paris hotel room…

When actors or directors announce that their next movie will be a long cherished passion project, it’s often time to nod sagely and mutter, “that’ll be nice”. Rupert Everett had been trying to get a movie made about the final three years in the life of Oscar Wilde for over five years, and he’s finally succeeded. You can imagine the pitch to potential investors, though: a movie about an alcoholic writer in the decrepitude of his final years, and without any chance of a happy ending. Full marks then to Everett for his perseverance, because despite the downbeat nature of the material, and the sadness of seeing a once great man reduced to abject penury, The Happy Prince is a fascinating and poignant examination of the last three years of Wilde’s life, and how those years took a further, irrevocable toll on him after two years in prison. It’s a largely melancholy, subdued account, but there are moments of joy and laughter and hope in amongst the heartbreak and despair, as Wilde reflects on his success and his subsequent downfall. Unafraid to show Wilde at his worst, and with the worst happening to him, Everett presents an unflinching portrait of the artist as an old man robbed of all his powers.

The movie has all the hallmarks of a grim tragedy, from Wilde, Turner and Ross being pursued in Italy by English thugs looking to intimidate and bully a great man brought low, to the inevitability of Douglas’ rejection of Wilde when money becomes an issue. Everett is magnificent in a role that he’s often unrecognisable in, the quality of the make up obliterating the actor/director’s angular features; he’s like a poster child for rampant, self-inflicted dissolution. What Everett captures perfectly is the sense of a man who knows his life is effectively over, but who clings to it, desperately, and however he can, even if it’s inappropriate (his drinking etc.). Everett, who also wrote the script, is a confident, detailed director, and he has a good eye for composition that some more practiced directors would be envious of. He’s an unselfish actor too, allowing the likes of Morgan and Thomas to shine in roles that might otherwise have appeared to be in subservience to the orbit of Everett’s own. That the movie isn’t as heavy going as it looks is another testament to the skill with which Everett assembles the various elements of Wilde’s post-prison experiences, and the way he weaves the story of the Happy Prince through the narrative, and has it reflect the state of Wilde’s own life depending on where the story has gotten to. For a first-time writer/director, Everett has revealed himself to be someone who should be encouraged to get behind the camera again as quickly as possible.

Rating: 8/10 – though the movie examines the tragedy of Wilde’s final years, The Happy Prince isn’t the depressing, maudlin experience that some viewers might be expecting, and instead is a quietly powerful expression of the will to survive in the bleakest of circumstances and surroundings; with effective supporting turns from the likes of Firth, Watson and Wilkinson, and appropriately gloomy cinematography by John Conroy, this is yet another potent reminder of Wilde the man, and his legacy.

Monthly Roundup – June 2018

01 Sunday Jul 2018

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Borg McEnroe (2017) / D: Janus Metz / 107m

Cast: Sverrir Gudnason, Shia LaBeouf, Stellan Skarsgård, Tuva Novotny, Leo Borg, Marcus Mossberg, Jackson Gann, Scott Arthur

Rating: 7/10 – the rivalry between tennis players Björn Borg (Gudnason) and John McEnroe (LaBeouf) is explored during the run up to the 1980 Wimbledon Tennis Championships, and the tournament itself; with a script that delves into both players’ formative years (and if you think Borg is a terrific choice for the young Swede then it’s no surprise: Bjōrn is his dad), Borg McEnroe is an absorbing yet diffident look at what drove both men to be as good as they were, and features fine work from Gudnason and LaBeouf, though at times it’s all a little too dry and respectful.

The Ferryman (2018) / D: Elliott Maguire / 76m

Cast: Nicola Holt, Garth Maunders, Shobi Rae Mclean, Pamela Ashton, Philip Scott-Shurety

Rating: 4/10 – following a suicide attempt, a young woman, Mara (Holt), finds herself experiencing strange phenomena and being pursued by a mysterious hooded figure; an ultra-low budget British horror, The Ferryman is let down by terrible performances, cringeworthy dialogue, and a patently obvious storyline, and yet it’s saved from complete disaster by a strong visual style that’s supported by a disconcerting soundtrack, an approach that first-timer Maguire exploits as often as possible.

Red Sparrow (2018) / D: Francis Lawrence / 140m

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton, Matthias Schoenaerts, Charlotte Rampling, Mary-Louise Parker, Ciarán Hinds, Joely Richardson, Bill Camp, Jeremy Irons, Thekla Reuten, Douglas Hodge

Rating: 6/10 – Ex-ballerina Dominika Egorova (Lawrence) is recruited to a secret Russian organisation that trains her to use her body as a weapon, and which then uses her to expose a double agent working in the heart of the Soviet system; a movie made up of so many twists and turns it becomes tiring to keep track of them all, Red Sparrow is an unlikely project to be released in the current gender/political climate, seeking as it does to objectify and fetishise its star as often as possible, but it tells a decent enough story while not exactly providing viewers with anything new or memorable.

Spinning Man (2018) / D: Simon Kaijser / 100m

Cast: Guy Pearce, Pierce Brosnan, Minnie Driver, Alexandra Shipp, Odeya Rush, Jamie Kennedy, Clark Gregg

Rating: 4/10 – when a teenage student (Rush) goes missing, suspicion falls on the professor (Pearce) who may or may not have been having a relationship with her; with arguably the most annoying character of 2018 propping up the narrative (Pearce’s commitment to the role doesn’t help), Spinning Man is a dreary mystery thriller that has its chief suspect behave as guiltily as possible and as often as he can, while putting him in as many unlikely situations as the script can come up with, all of which makes for a dismally executed movie that can’t even rustle up a decent denouement.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) / D: J.A. Bayona / 128m

Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, Justice Smith, Daniella Pineda, James Cromwell, Toby Jones, Ted Levine, Jeff Goldblum, BD Wong, Geraldine Chaplin, Isabella Sermon

Rating: 7/10 – with the volcano on Isla Nublar about to erupt, a rescue mission is launched to save as many of the dinosaurs as possible, but it’s a rescue mission with an ulterior motive; clearly the movie designed to move the series forward – just how many times can Jurassic Park be reworked before everyone gets fed up with it all? – Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom concentrates on the horror elements that have always been a part of the franchise’s raison d’être, and does so in a way that broadens the scope of the series, and allows Bayona to provide an inventive twist on the old dark house scenario.

Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A. (1946) / D: Spencer Williams / 61m

Cast: Francine Everett, Don Wilson, Katherine Moore, Alfred Hawkins, David Boykin, L.E. Lewis, Inez Newell, Piano Frank, John King

Rating: 7/10 – making an appearance at a club on a Caribbean island resort, dancer Gertie La Rue’s free-spirited behaviour causes all sorts of problems, for her and for the men she meets; an all-black production that takes W. Somerset Maugham’s tale Miss Thompson and puts its own passionate spin on it, Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A. overcomes its limited production values thanks to its faux-theatrical mise-en-scene, Williams’ confidence as a director, a vivid performance from Everett that emphasises Gertie’s irresponsible nature, and by virtue of the relaxed attitude it takes to the themes of race and sexuality.

Wagon Wheels (1934) / D: Charles Barton / 59m

Cast: Randolph Scott, Gail Patrick, Billy Lee, Monte Blue, Raymond Hatton, Jan Duggan, Leila Bennett, Olin Howland

Rating: 5/10 – a wagon train heading for Oregon encounters trials and hardships along the way, including Indian attacks that are being organised by someone who’s a part of the group; a middling Western that finds too much room for songs round the campfire, Wagon Wheels takes a while to get going, but once it does, it has pace and a certain amount of B-movie charm thanks to Scott’s square-jawed performance, and Barton’s experienced direction, benefits that help offset the clunky storyline and one-note characters.

Batman: Gotham by Gaslight (2018) / D: Sam Liu / 77m

Cast: Bruce Greenwood, Jennifer Carpenter, Scott Patterson, Kari Wuhrer, Anthony Head, Yuri Lowenthal, William Salyers, Grey Griffin

Rating: 6/10 – in an alternate, Victorian-era Gotham City, the Batman (Greenwood) has only recently begun his efforts at stopping crime, efforts that see him cross paths with the notorious Jack the Ripper; though kudos is due to Warner Bros. for trying something different, Batman: Gotham by Gaslight doesn’t always feel as if it’s been thoroughly thought out, with too much time given over to the mystery of Jack’s real identity, and a sub-plot involving Selena Kyle (Carpenter) that seems designed to pad out a storyline that doesn’t have enough substance for a full-length feature.

Batman vs. Two-Face (2017) / D: Rick Morales / 72m

Cast: Adam West, Burt Ward, William Shatner, Julie Newmar, Steven Weber, Jim Ward, Lee Meriwether

Rating: 6/10 – when a laboratory accident turns Gotham City District Attorney Harvey Dent (Shatner) into arch-villain Two-Face, Batman (West) and Robin (Ward) soon end his criminal activities, only to find themselves battling all their old adversaries – but who is manipulating them?; what probably seemed like a good idea at the time – have West and Ward (and Newmar) reprise their television roles – Batman vs. Two-Face is let down by a tired script that does its best to revisit past TV glories but without replicating the sheer ebullience the 60’s series enjoyed, making this very much a missed opportunity.

Stratton (2017) / D: Simon West / 94m

Cast: Dominic Cooper, Austin Stowell, Gemma Chan, Connie Nielsen, Thomas Kretschmann, Tom Felton, Derek Jacobi, Igal Naor

Rating: 4/10 – a Special Boat Service commando, John Stratton (Cooper), teams up with an American military operative (Stowell) to track down an international terrorist cell that is targeting a major Western target – but which one?; the kind of action movie that wants to be packed with impressive action sequences, and thrilling moments, Stratton is let down by a tepid script, restrictive production values, poor performances, and despite West’s best efforts, action scenes that only inspire yawns, not appreciation.

SnakeHead Swamp (2014) / D: Don E. FauntLeRoy / 86m

Cast: Ayla Kell, Dave Davis, Terri Garber, Antonio Fargas

Rating: 3/10 – a truck full of genetically mutated snakehead fish crashes, releasing its cargo into the Louisiana swamp land, where they soon start making their way to the top of the food chain; another lousy SyFy movie that mixes mutant creatures, endangered teens, a muddled voodoo subplot, and sub-par special effects to less than astounding results, SnakeHead Swamp might best be described as a “no-brainer”, in that it doesn’t try very hard, FauntLeRoy’s direction is rarely noticeable, and the cast – even Fargas – don’t come anywhere near making their characters credible or realistic, all of which is down to a script that should have been rejected at the title stage.

Mary Shelley (2017)

03 Sunday Jun 2018

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D: Haifaa al-Mansour / 120m

Cast: Elle Fanning, Douglas Booth, Stephen Dillane, Bel Powley, Tom Sturridge, Joanne Froggatt, Ben Hardy, Maisie Williams

London, 1813. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Fanning) is the sixteen year old daughter of bookseller and political philosopher, William Godwin (Dillane). Mary is wilful, and more interested in reading and writing than contributing to the household chores, and this in turn causes bad feelings with her stepmother (Froggatt). Things come to a head and Mary is sent to stay with one of her father’s friends in Scotland. There she meets the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Booth), and an attraction develops between them. When Mary returns to London, Shelley follows her and their relationship deepens, even though Mary learns Shelley is married and has a child. Leaving her family home along with her stepsister Claire Clairmont (Powley), the pair and Shelley at first live in less than impressive surroundings until Shelley comes into some money. An invitation through Claire to stay with notorious poet and philanderer Lord Byron (Sturridge) near Geneva in the summer of 1816 comes just at the right time: Shelley’s creditors are literally knocking at the door. Once there, a challenge from Byron to write a ghost story led Mary to begin writing the novel that would seal her fame and her reputation…

A heritage picture with all the attendant tropes that go with it, Mary Shelley focuses on the early romantic life of the creator of Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus, and does its best to show the trials and tribulations that made up Mary’s life, but without connecting them convincingly with the writing of her classic novel. With any historical biography, the problem lies in recreating an acceptable and authentic sounding series of events to illustrate how a novel, a painting, or a similar work of art came into being. Emma Jensen’s original screenplay does its best – there’s the loss of Mary’s mother shortly after she was born, a theatrical display of galvanism, querulous thoughts on an afterlife – but it can’t quite make us believe that Mary was destined to write her “ghost story” in the way that the script would have us accept. There’s both encouragement and discouragement from Shelley, Mary’s own determination to prove a patriarchal society that it’s dismissal of the efforts of women is wrong, and inevitably, the support of her father at a crucial point in the novel’s publication. That these things happened is not necessarily in dispute, but the way in which they’re laid out is unfortunately quite mundane.

This proves a detriment to the movie overall, with al-Mansour’s efforts held in check by the demands of the feel and shape of the narrative, which is respectful without being passionate, and fluid though without feeling driven. There are the requisite setbacks and tragedies on display, and they come at their expected moments, and so much so that you can tick them off as you watch. This leaves Fanning somewhat adrift in a movie that her peformance dominates, and which allows her to show a greater range and skill in her portrayal of Mary than is usually the case. In support, Booth is a gifted yet emotionally petulant Shelley, Powley is terrific as the envious stepsister trying to make her own mark through an unfortunate dalliance with Byron, and Dillane does seemingly little, but to such good effect that he’s the focus of every scene he’s in. al-Mansour, following up her debut feature Wadjda (2012), is a great choice as director but again is defeated by the apparent requirements for making a period picture. It’s ironic then, that a movie about the creator of a literary figure brought to life by lightning, lacks the spark needed to bring it’s own tale fully to life.

Rating: 6/10 – it looks good (thanks to David Ungaro’s sterling cinematography), and it’s replete with good performances, but Mary Shelley is ultimately too pedestrian in nature and presentation to linger in the memory; the romance between Mary and Percy fizzles out in a perfunctory “that’s done” fashion, her stance as a proto-feminist (and the nominal ease with which she overcomes the gender prejudice of the times) is clunky, and is undermined by the movie’s end, where her fame and fortune is guaranteed by the intervention of her lover and her father – and there’s further irony for you.

Bombshell (2017)

15 Tuesday May 2018

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aka Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story

D: Alexandra Dean / 88m

With Hedy Lamarr, Anthony Loder, Denise Loder-Deluca, Fleming Meeks, Robert Osborne, Wendy Colton, Diane Kruger, Stephen Michael Shearer, Jimmy Loder, Jeanine Basinger, Peter Bogdanovich

In recent years, Hedy Lamarr and her life and work have been the subject of a critical reappraisal, from her role as an actress in Hollywood, to her other work as an inventor. This duality has been examined and explored through plays and photographic exhibitions, and her influence has extended as far as being the inspiration for Anne Hathaway’s portrayal of Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Bombshell charts Lamarr’s life from her childhood growing up in Vienna (as Hedy Kiesler), through to her early movie career and the production that brought her both fame and notoriety, Extase (1933), in which she appeared nude. Her family’s Jewish background put them at risk from the Nazis and so she fled Vienna to Paris where she met Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM. She began her Hollywood career soon after, but she made a more lasting contribution through her work as an inventor, coming up with a system – in conjunction with composer George Antheil – called frequency hopping, something that stopped torpedoes from being tracked or jammed.

This occurred during World War II, and up until this stage, Bombshell is something of a standard biopic, charting Lamarr’s rise as an actress, and highlighting the Viennese background that propelled her, unexpectedly, to international stardom. Lamarr’s determination to succeed is also highlighted, as is her belief in herself and her abilities. But it’s the invention of frequency hopping – and its eventual use by the US Navy – that proves to be most intriguing. The documentary tells a story of bad luck and bad timing as Lamarr’s work proves too difficult to be adapted during the war, and when it is finally adopted in the early Sixties it’s too late for Lamarr to capitalise on its use financially. By this time her acting career has come to an end, and she has begun to withdraw from public life, becoming something of a recluse. Her children from her marriage to John Loder, Anthony and Denise, tell a story of ill-advised plastic surgery – footage of Lamarr in her later years shows just how much it was a bad idea – family estrangement (another son, Jimmy, believed he was adopted and chose to be brought up by someone else), and arrests for shoplifting.

Bombshell brings all these strands and aspects of Lamarr’s life together in a cogent and deftly considered way thanks to a mix of recent interviews, archival footage and photography, and recordings made by journalist Fleming Meeks in 1990 when he interviewed Lamarr, but which he thought were lost. The movie gains depth and a large degree of poignancy from the way in which Lamarr’s life played out in such a sad way in her later years, and the bittersweet emphasis on her beauty (knowing where it will lead) adds pathos as well. In the end, and despite the setbacks in both her careers (only a handful of her movies have stood the test of time), Lamarr’s story is one of huge promise that was only moderately and temporarily realised. Making her feature debut, Dean assembles the highs and lows of Lamarr’s life – married six times, highly regarded for her beauty if not her brains, more interesting away from acting – and paints a compelling portrait of a woman who was perhaps born two or three decades too soon. Ultimately it’s a sad tale because of its outcome, but thanks to Dean and the participation of Lamarr’s family, it’s also a celebration of an extraordinary woman who was much, much more than just a great beauty.

Rating: 8/10 – with an honesty about its subject that is sincere and affecting, Bombshell is a fascinating look at Hedy Lamarr the person, rather than just the actress or the inventor; a biography that examines much of her life in detail, and with a sympathetic approach, it’s an absorbing tale that does Lamarr justice in a way that, in many ways, she wasn’t granted while she was alive.

Monthly Roundup – March 2018

31 Saturday Mar 2018

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The LEGO Ninjago Movie (2017) / D: Charlie Bean, Paul Fisher, Bob Logan / 101m

Cast: Jackie Chan, Dave Franco, Justin Theroux, Fred Armisen, Kumail Nanjiani, Michael Peña, Abbi Jacobson, Zach Woods, Olivia Munn

Rating: 6/10 – when you’re the despised son (Franco) of an evil warlord (Theroux), there’s only one thing you can do: vow to defeat him with the aid of your ninja friends; after a superhero mash-up and a solo Batman outing, The LEGO Ninjago Movie brings us ninjas, but in the process forgets to provide viewers with much in the way of story, though the visual  innovation is still there, as is (mostly) the humour, making this something that is only just more of a hit than a miss.

Braven (2018) / D: Lin Oeding / 94m

Cast: Jason Momoa, Garret Dillahunt, Stephen Lang, Jill Wagner, Zahn McClarnon, Brendan Fletcher, Sala Baker, Teach Grant, Sasha Rossof

Rating: 4/10 – a trip for Joe Braven (Momoa) and his father (Lang) to their family cabin located in the Canadian wilderness sees them fighting for their lives when drug runners come to claim a shipment that has been hidden in the cabin; an unsophisticated action thriller, Braven has an earnestness to it that sees it through some of its more absurdist moments, but its Nineties vibe works against it too often for comfort, and despite the occasional effort, Dillahunt remains an unconvincing villain.

Passport to Destiny (1944) / D: Ray McCarey / 61m

Cast: Elsa Lanchester, Gordon Oliver, Lenore Aubert, Lionel Royce, Fritz Feld, Joseph Vitale, Gavin Muir, Lloyd Corrigan

Rating: 6/10 – in World War II, a cleaning woman, Ella Muggins (Lanchester), who believes herself to be protected from harm thanks to a magical glass eye, determines to travel to Berlin and kill Hitler; a whimsical comic fantasy that somehow manages to have its heroine save a German officer (Oliver) and his girlfriend, Passport to Destiny is an uneven yet enjoyable product of its time, with a terrific central performance by Lanchester, and a winning sense of its own absurdity.

Hellraiser: Judgment (2018) / D: Gary J. Tunnicliffe / 81m

Cast: Damon Carney, Randy Wayne, Alexandra Harris, Paul T. Taylor, Gary J. Tunnicliffe, Helena Grace Donald, Heather Langenkamp

Rating: 3/10 – the hunt for a serial killer finds its lead detective (Carney) coming face to face with the Cenobites – still led by Pinhead (Taylor) – but the solution to the case isn’t as obvious as it seems; the tenth movie in the series, Hellraiser: Judgment at least tries to offer something new in terms of the Cenobites’ involvement, but in the end it can’t escape the fact that Pinhead et al are no longer frightening, the franchise’s penchant for sado-masochistic violence has lost any impact it may once have had, and as with every entry since Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), it fails to introduce one single character for the viewer to care about.

The Final Year (2017) / D: Greg Barker / 89m

With: Ben Rhodes, Samantha Power, John Kerry, Barack Obama

Rating: 7/10 – a look at the final year of Barack Obama’s second term as President of the United States focuses on his foreign policy team and their diplomatic efforts on the global stage; featuring contributions from some of the key players, The Final Year is an interesting if not fully realised documentary that never asks (or finds an answer for) the fundamental question of why Obama’s administration chose to concentrate so much on foreign policy in its last days, something that keeps all the good work that was achieved somewhat in isolation from the viewer.

And Then Came Lola (2009) / D: Ellen Seidler, Megan Siler / 71m

Cast: Ashleigh Sumner, Jill Bennett, Cathy DeBuono, Jessica Graham, Angelyna Martinez, Candy Tolentino, Linda Ignazi

Rating: 4/10 – in a series of Groundhog Day-style episodes, the undisciplined Lola (Sumner) is required to rush a set of photographs to her interior designer girlfriend, Casey (Bennett), so she can seal the deal at a job interview – but she has varying degrees of success; an LGBTQ+ comedy that stops the action every so often to allow its female cast to make out with each other, And Then Came Lola doesn’t put enough spins on its central conceit, and doesn’t make you care enough if Lola comes through or not.

The Ritual (2017) / D: David Bruckner / 94m

Cast: Rafe Spall, Arsher Ali, Robert James-Collier, Sam Troughton, Paul Reid, Maria Erwolter

Rating: 7/10 – following the tragic death of one of their friends, four men embark on a memorial hiking trip in Sweden, but when one of them is injured, taking a short cut through a forest puts all their lives in jeopardy; a creature feature with a nasty edge to it and above average performances for a horror movie, The Ritual employs mystery as well as terror as it creates a growing sense of dread before it runs out of narrative steam and tries to give its monster a back story that brings the tension up short and leads to a not entirely credible denouement.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) / D: Jake Kasdan / 119m

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Karen Gillan, Rhys Darby, Bobby Cannavale, Nick Jonas, Alex Wolff, Ser’Darius Blain, Madison Iseman, Morgan Turner

Rating: 7/10 – four teenagers find themselves transported into a video game called Jumanji, where, transformed into avatars, they are charged with thwarting the dastardly plans of the game’s chief villain (Cannavale); a reboot more than a sequel, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle has the benefit of well-drawn, likeable characters, winning performances from Johnson, Hart, Black and Gillan, and confident direction from Kasdan, all things that serve to distract from the uninspired game levels and the predictable nature of its main storyline.

Paddington 2 (2017) / D: Paul King / 103m

Cast: Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins, Ben Whishaw, Hugh Grant, Brendan Gleeson, Julie Walters, Jim Broadbent, Peter Capaldi, Imelda Staunton, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Ben Miller, Jessica Hynes, Noah Taylor, Joanna Lumley

Rating: 9/10 – the theft of a unique pop-up book sees Paddington (Whishaw) end up in jail while the Brown family do their best to track down the real thief, Phoenix Buchanan (Grant); an absolute joy, Paddington 2 is just so unexpectedly good that even just thinking about it is likely to put a smile on your face, something that’s all too rare these days, and which is thanks to an inspired script by director King and Simon Farnaby, terrific performances from all concerned, and buckets of perfectly judged humour.

Gangster Land (2017) / D: Timothy Woodward Jr / 113m

Original title: In the Absence of Good Men

Cast: Sean Faris, Milo Gibson, Jason Patric, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Peter Facinelli, Mark Rolston, Michael Paré

Rating: 4/10 – the rise of boxer Jack McGurn (Faris) from potential champion to right-hand man to Al Capone (Gibson), and his involvement in Capone’s feud with ‘Bugs’ Moran (Facinelli); a biopic that’s hampered by lacklustre performances and a leaden script, Gangster Land wants to be thought of as classy but budgetary constraints mean otherwise, and Woodward Jr’s direction doesn’t inject many scenes with the necessary energy to maintain the viewer’s interest, something that leaves the movie feeling moribund for long stretches.

Pitch Perfect 3 (2017) / D: Trish Sie / 93m

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson, Brittany Snow, Anna Camp, Hailee Steinfeld, John Lithgow, Ruby Rose, Matt Lanter, Elizabeth Banks, John Michael Higgins, DJ Khaled

Rating: 4/10 – the Borden Bellas are back for one last reunion before they all go their separate ways, taking part in a European tour and competing for the chance to open for DJ Khaled; a threequel that adds nothing new to the mix (even if you include Lithgow as Wilson’s scoundrel father), and which is as empty-headed as you’d expect, Pitch Perfect 3 isn’t even well thought out enough to justify its existence and trades on old glories in the hope that the audience won’t notice that’s what they are.

Something Real and Good (2013) / D: Luke Rivett / 81m

Cast: Matt Jones, Alex Hannant, Colton Castaneda, Marla Stone

Rating: 4/10 – he (Jones) meets her (Hannant) in an airport lounge, and over the next twenty-four hours, get to know each other, flirt, have fun, and stay in a hotel together due to their flight being cancelled; the slightness of the story – boy meets girl, they talk and talk and talk and talk – is further undermined by the cod-philosophising and trite observations on life and relationships that they come out with, leaving Something Real and Good as a title that’s a little over-optimistic, though if it achieves anything, it’ll be to stop people from striking up random conversations with strangers in airports – and that’s now a good thing.

Ladies First (2017) / D: Uraaz Bahi / 39m

With: Deepika Kumari, Geeta Devi, Shiv Narayan Mahto, Dharmendra Tiwari

Rating: 8/10 – the story of Deepika Kumari, at one time the number one archer in the world, and her efforts to obtain Olympic gold in 2012 and 2016; a sobering documentary that for a while feels like it’s going to be a standard tale of triumph over adversity (here, relating to Indian culture and gender equality), Ladies First offers a much deeper examination of success and failure than might be expected, and shows that in India, as in many other countries, there are precious few opportunities for women to be anything more than wives and mothers.

Heritage Falls (2016) / D: Shea Sizemore / 88m

Cast: David Keith, Coby Ryan McLaughlin, Keean Johnson, Sydney Penny, Nancy Stafford, Devon Ogden

Rating: 4/10 – three generations of males head off for a bonding weekend designed to overcome the divisions that are keeping them distant or apart from each other; a mixed bag of drama and lightweight comedy, Heritage Falls wants to say something sincere and relevant about father-son relationships, but falls way short in its ambitions thanks to a script that can’t provide even one of its protagonists with a convincing argument for their position, a bland visual style, and even blander direction from Sizemore, making this a turgid exercise in emotional dysfunction.

The Long Dark Hall (1951) / D: Anthony Bushell, Reginald Beck / 86m

Cast: Rex Harrison, Lilli Palmer, Denis O’Dea, Reginald Huntley, Anthony Dawson, Brenda de Banzie, Eric Pohlmann

Rating: 7/10 – when an actress is murdered in the room she rents, suspicion falls on her lover, married man Arthur Groome (Harrison), but even though he goes on trial at the Old Bailey, his wife, Mary (Palmer), stands by him; an early UK attempt at film noir, The Long Dark Hall has its fair share of tension, particularly in a scene at the Groome home where Mary is alone with the real killer (Dawson), but Harrison doesn’t seem fully committed (it wasn’t one of his favourite projects), and the screenplay lurches too often into uncomfortable melodrama, though overall this has an air of fatalism that keeps it intriguing for viewers who are used to their crime thrillers being a little more straightforward.

Ready Player One (2018) / D: Steven Spielberg / 140m

Cast: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Lena Waithe, T.J. Miller, Simon Pegg, Mark Rylance, Philip Zhao, Win Morisaki, Hannah John-Kamen

Rating: 7/10 – in 2045, people have become obsessed with a virtual reality game called Oasis where anything can happen, but when its creator (Rylance) reveals there’s a hidden prize within the game, one that will give overall control of the game and its licence to the winner, it’s up to a small group of gamers led by Parzifal (Sheridan) to stop a rival corporation from winning; an elaborate sci-fi fantasy that provides a nostalgia overload for fans of Eighties pop culture in particular, Ready Player One has plenty of visual pizzazz, but soon runs out of steam in the story department, and offers way too much exposition in lieu of a proper script, a situation it tries to overcome by being dazzling if empty-headed, but which in the hands of Steven Spielberg still manages to be very entertaining indeed – if you don’t give it too much thought.

The Temple (2017) / D: Michael Barrett / 78m

Cast: Logan Huffman, Natalia Warner, Brandon Sklenar, Naoto Takenaka, Asahi Uchida

Rating: 4/10 – three American tourists – best friends Chris (Huffman) and Kate (Warner), and Kate’s boyfriend, James (Sklenar) – are travelling in Japan when they hear about an abandoned temple and decide to go there, little knowing what will happen to them once they get there; even with its post-visit framing device designed to add further mystery to events, The Temple is a chore to sit through thanks to its being yet another horror movie where people behave stupidly so that a number of uninspired “shocks” can be trotted out, along with dreary dialogue and the (actually) terrible realisation that movie makers still think that by plundering legends and myths from other countries then their movies will be much more original and scary… and that’s simply not true.

Chokeslam (2016) / D: Robert Cuffley / 102m

Cast: Chris Marquette, Amanda Crew, Michael Eklund, Niall Matter, Gwynyth Walsh, Mick Foley

Rating: 5/10 – a 10-year high school reunion gives deli owner Corey (Marquette) the chance to reconnect with the girl he loved, Sheena (Crew), who is now a famous female wrestler; a lightweight romantic comedy that pokes moderate fun at the world of wrestling, Chokeslam is innocuous where it should be daring, and bland when it should be heartwarming, making it a movie that’s populated almost entirely by stock characters dealing with stock situations and problems, and which, unsurprisingly, provides them with entirely stock solutions.

All the Money in the World (2017) / D: Ridley Scott / 132m

Cast: Michelle Williams, Christopher Plummer, Mark Wahlberg, Romain Duris, Timothy Hutton, Charlie Plummer, Marco Leonardi, Giuseppe Bonifati

Rating: 8/10 – a recreation of the kidnapping in 1973 of John Paul Getty III (Charlie Plummer), and the subsequent attempts by his mother, Gail (Williams), to persuade his grandfather (Christopher Plummer) to pay the ransom, something the then world’s richest man refuses to do; Scott’s best movie in years, All the Money in the World is a taut, compelling thriller that tells its story with ruthless expediency and features yet another commanding performance from Williams, something that takes the spotlight away from the presence of Christopher Plummer (who’s good but not great), and which serves as a reminder that money isn’t the central concern here, but a mother’s unwavering love for her child.

5 Headed Shark Attack (2017) / D: Nico De Leon / 98m

Cast: Chris Bruno, Nikki Howard, Lindsay Sawyer, Jeffrey Holsman, Chris Costanzo, Amaanda Méndez, Ian Daryk, Jorge Navarro, Lorna Hernandez, Michelle Cortès, Nicholas Nene

Rating: 3/10 – a four-headed shark terrorises the waters off Palomino Island in Puerto Rico before mutating into a five-headed shark, and being hunted by both the island’s police force, and a team of marine biologists from a local aquarium; operating at the bargain bucket end of the movie business, 5 Headed Shark Attack, SyFy’s latest cheaply made farrago, references Sharknado (2013) early on (as if it’s being clever), and then does it’s absolute best to make its audience cringe and wince and wish they’d never started watching in the first place, something the awful screenplay, dialogue, acting, special effects and direction all manage without even trying.

Spielberg (2017)

18 Sunday Mar 2018

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D: Susan Lacy / 147m

With: Steven Spielberg, Leah Adler, Francis Ford Coppola, Daniel Day-Lewis, Brian De Palma, Leonardo DiCaprio, Richard Dreyfuss, Sally Field, Tom Hanks, Michael Kahn, Janusz Kaminski, Tony Kushner, George Lucas, Janet Maslin, Dennis Muren, Martin Scorsese, A.O. Scott, Anne Spielberg, Arnold Spielberg, Nancy Spielberg, Sue Spielberg, John Williams, Vilmos Zsigmond

Spielberg opens with a confession from the man himself: that when he saw Lawrence of Arabia (1962) for the first time, it made him realise he couldn’t be a director. The scope and the depth of David Lean’s extraordinary movie was so far beyond Spielberg’s own capabilities as a budding movie maker that it was overwhelming. But not even Lean’s masterpiece could deter him completely. The next week he saw it again, and again the week after that, and the week after that… Awake to the possibilities that cinema could offer and provide, Spielberg continued to make short movies of his own, including Amblin’ (1968). This brought him to the attention of Sid Sheinberg, then president of Universal, who took a chance on him. A short stint in television led to his first feature, Duel (1971), and just four years later, he changed the face of cinema forever by making the first summer blockbuster, Jaws (1975). The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

Susan Lacy’s celebratory documentary focuses on the various highs of Spielberg’s career, while studiously ignoring the lows. This is to be expected perhaps, but while the likes of Jaws, E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Schindler’s List (1993), Jurassic Park (1993), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Munich (2005), and Lincoln (2012) are studied in some detail, once 1941 (1979) is dealt with (“Why couldn’t I make a comedy?”), the focus settles on establishing Spielberg as a predominantly serious movie maker, and not the populist movie maker who, at his best, can still inspire the kinds of awe and wonder that other directors can only dream of. Lacy looks to how Spielberg has grown as a director, and how he’s used each new experience behind the camera as a way of augmenting and perfecting his craft. Even now, after more than fifty years as a director, Spielberg comes across as someone who’s still learning, and is eager to do so. It doesn’t hurt that he’s an engaging and often self-deprecating interviewee, and throughout he makes references to growing up and being a child of divorce, something that has infused much of his work since.

His recollections and reminiscences are supported by a range of collaborators and interested parties, but none are as interesting as those supplied by his family, from his mother Leah, father Arnold, and sisters Anne, Nancy and Sue. Their memories of his childhood, coupled with his feelings about being Jewish, help broaden our understanding of Spielberg the person, and what has driven him in his work over the years. But while he’s open and honest about his parents’ divorce and the effect it had on him, and the importance of his own family now, the absence of Kate Capshaw is curious (and unexplained). That aside, and though the movie overall is a fascinating endorsement of his career and achievements, it’s perhaps a little too safe in its approach. Though a plethora of behind the scenes footage, and photographs from his childhood and early career is welcome, and Spielberg is a worthy subject, there’s a sense that his observations about those movies which weren’t so successful – Hook (1991), The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), or The BFG (2016) – would have been equally welcome. Lacy correctly focuses on Spielberg’s strengths as a director and the high regard he has amongst his peers, but even that brings up another issue: with Spielberg having had a considerable influence on a range of movie makers over the last forty-plus years, why are their contributions as noticeably absent as Capshaw’s?

Rating: 7/10 – a documentary that isn’t as wide-ranging as it could have been (and despite its running time), Spielberg is still an entertaining journey through the director’s life and career that is informative and convivial; having Spielberg revisit many of his movies is illuminating, and there’s enough here that’s new or previously unrevealed to make this – for now – the place to go to find out how and why he makes the movies he does.

Molly’s Game (2017)

08 Monday Jan 2018

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D: Aaron Sorkin / 140m

Cast: Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Kevin Costner, Michael Cera, Jeremy Strong, Chris O’Dowd, J.C. MacKenzie, Brian d’Arcy James, Bill Camp, Graham Greene, Jon Bass

With the issue of women trying to get ahead in a “man’s world” receiving so much attention right now, the arrival of Aaron Sorkin’s debut as a director seems like very good timing indeed. Based on the true story of Molly Bloom (Chastain), a potential Olympic-class skier forced to retire through injury, and how she came to run one of the world’s most exclusive high-stakes poker games – twice, Sorkin’s debut is a dazzling whirl through the twilight world of underground gambling where fortunes are won and lost at the turn of a card. Molly begins her second career while working for Dean Keith (Strong), a struggling businessman who hosts his own underground game, and who tells her to oversee the game each week. When her relationship with Keith becomes irretrievably strained, she starts up her own game, steals away one of his main players, an actor referred to as Player X (Cera), and begins to make a name for herself. Avoiding taking a cut of the money being wagered, Molly isn’t doing anything illegal, but she falls foul of Player X’s ego and the game is taken away from her. She moves to New York where she starts another game but this time she begins to take a cut. She bows out after a couple of years, but two years later, finds herself being arrested and charged with, amongst other things, money laundering. Enter the man who will represent her in court, Charlie Jaffey (Elba)…

Like many biopics, Molly’s Game doesn’t tell Bloom’s real story, but instead uses its bare bones to explore a world where gambling is its own addictive drug of choice, and the players wage obscene amounts of money for the thrill of it. It’s a world that Sorkin portrays with a great deal of fidelity, but while it’s an interesting and compelling world to spend time in – and the movie spends as much time there as it can – it does mean that Molly herself is placed firmly in the background. There are too many times where she’s the observer, watching the players while offering a pointed commentary on their habits and foibles. The movie is on firmer ground when it’s showing the process by which Molly and Jaffey spar their way to a workable defence strategy, with her refusal to implicate others or break her own self-imposed ethical code, proving at odds with Jaffey’s efforts to keep her out of jail. The scenes between Chastain and Elba crackle with an urgency and an intensity that isn’t always there when Molly’s past is being recounted, and while Sorkin the director in conjunction with editors Alan Baumgarten, Elliot Graham, and Josh Schaeffer, keeps things moving at quite a lick (the running time doesn’t feel like it’s anywhere near two hours and twenty minutes), the movie’s non-linear approach does undercut any potential or hard-earned momentum.

But if there’s one area of the screenplay that no one should worry about, it’s the dialogue. This is a movie where the dialogue is so well structured and so well held together through the various vocal rhythms associated with the characters, that not one word feels false or sounds awkward when it’s spoken. Sorkin’s good ear works its magic as usual, and there are times when it’s easy to believe that Molly et al spoke these actual words during the real-life situations being depicted. Even a scene late on between Molly and her uncompromising father (Costner), a scene that screams plot contrivance at the top of its lungs, is so deftly written that you can almost forgive the hackneyed nature of it. Sorkin is also well served by his cast, with Chastain and Elba both giving terrific performances, and they in turn are given equally terrific support from the likes of Costner, Cera, and O’Dowd. This is a confident debut feature from Sorkin, and even though some of it feels a little stretched in terms of “did it really happen that way?” there’s no denying the energy and the appeal of seeing one woman carving out her own niche in a man’s world and sticking to her own principles while she does it.

Rating: 8/10 – top-notch performances from Chastain and Elba added to another script full of riches from Sorkin (and his surprisingly flexible direction) make Molly’s Game a hugely enjoyable movie even when it steers perilously close to Movie Biopic Clichés 101; if you’re not into poker some of this will go way over your head, and there are a few silly missteps along the way, but otherwise this is a fast-paced, freewheeling, and above all fun experience that doesn’t rely on depth or subtexts at all in telling Bloom’s story.

Stronger (2017)

17 Sunday Dec 2017

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D: David Gordon Green / 119m

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Tatiana Maslany, Miranda Richardson, Clancy Brown, Richard Lane Jr, Nate Richman, Lenny Clarke, Patty O’Neil, Kate Fitzgerald, Danny McCarthy, Frankie Shaw, Carlos Sanz

Following in the wake of Patriots Day (2016), Peter Berg’s excellent recreation of the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers, we have Stronger, a movie that focuses on one of the victims on that occasion, a Costco employee called Jeff Bauman (Gyllenhaal). Adapted from the book he wrote about his experiences after losing both his legs from above the knee down, Bauman’s tale is one of physical and emotional hardship, but most of all, how his relationship with on again, off again girlfriend, Erin Hurley (Maslany), made all the difference to his rehabilitation. It’s another true story of triumph over adversity, but while Jeff’s story – by itself – is inspiring, the movie itself isn’t quite as satisfactory.

Biopics often have a hard time avoiding the clichés of the genre. In recounting the trials and tribulations of someone who has suffered greatly through personal trauma, there’s usually a list of stock situations to be worked through. Most of them adhere to the various stages of grief, and so audiences can almost tick off these stock situations as they go along, but while Stronger does its best to avoid these clichés, in doing so it actually robs the movie of a lot of what would involve the audience more. Sure, we see Jeff falling off the toilet because his centre of gravity is out of whack, and yes, he tries to push Erin away because of self-pity, and of course, he misses rehab appointments because he can’t motivate himself, but while these are all established staples, here they’re downplayed to the point where the movie runs the risk of feeling a little detached from its subject matter and main character. There’s a matter-of-fact approach adopted by director David Gordon Green that stops the viewer from fully engaging with Jeff and his struggle to walk again.

Partly this is due to the way in which John Pollono’s script tackles the various stages of Jeff’s recovery. It always feels like a piecemeal attempt to tell a larger story, and while the focus on Jeff and Erin’s fractious relationship is to be commended, it doesn’t take long for the viewer to realise that without it the movie would be a lot shorter and a lot less interesting. Stripped of this central relationship, and once he’s lost his legs, the movie would consist merely of scenes between Jeff and his alcoholic mother, Patty (Richardson), a handful of other scenes featuring Jeff and his friends, Jeff being feted as a living breathing incarnation of the Boston Strong ideal, and further scenes where he’s told off for not going to his rehab appointments. All these are exactly the kind of things you’d expect to see in a movie such as this, and in that respect, the movie doesn’t disappoint. But there have been far too many other movies made along similar lines, and there’s not enough effort made to make this stand out from the crowd.

Bauman’s story, however, is made more interesting through his relationship with Erin. Pre-bombing, Jeff isn’t the most committed of boyfriends, but Erin has always allowed herself to give him another chance after splitting up with him. The irony of what happened to Jeff isn’t lost on the movie, as the only reason he was near the finishing line when the first bomb went off, was because he was there to support Erin (who was taking part in the race), and to show that she could rely on him more than in the past. Their connection is strengthened by Erin’s innate decency in supporting Jeff through the days and months that follow, and also by his need to have someone capable of looking after him; Patty is a semi-functioning alcoholic who admits she hasn’t been the greatest of mothers. With his father, Jeff Sr (Brown), reduced to hanging around in the background the longer the movie goes on, Jeff leans on Erin quite heavily, and as the dynamic of their relationship shifts and changes, it’s Erin’s own sense of self-respect that allows her to make a decision that, along with meeting the man who saved his life, Carlos Arredondo (Sanz), helps Jeff to dig himself out of the mire of self-pity and self-doubt that he’s surrounded himself with.

As Jeff, Gyllenhaal puts in another committed, powerful performance that sees the actor express Jeff’s confusion and anguish and dismay and anger at being placed in such a difficult position. However, his commitment to the role is hampered by the script’s determination not to make things too difficult for Jeff, as each obstacle he encounters is quickly overcome so that he can move on to the next – and overcome that one just as easily. If anything, this approach comes as something of a surprise, especially when it becomes obvious that Maslany’s portrayal of Erin is the movie’s strong suit, instead of Gyllenhaal’s portrayal of Jeff. It’s a career best performance from Maslany, who takes charge of the role and makes Erin the movie’s heart and soul. She’s simply mesmerising, and she finds new and different ways to make Erin more than the eternally supportive and self-sacrificing (i.e. stock) girlfriend that she could have been in other hands. In their scenes together, Maslany is so good that she’s always the focus and not Gyllenhaal; when the camera’s on him, you want it to shift back to her as quickly as possible.

There are many elements that are allowed to play out without any resolution, and a lot of things that are left unaddressed, such as the marital status of Jeff’s parents (are they divorced, separated, taking a break?), and though Green directs with his usual flair for exploiting emotional undercurrents, he’s not given too many occasions where he can do this. Certain scenes lack purpose – the script could have done with some judicious pruning – and there are times when Jeff’s family and friends seem present only to provide the movie with a sense of humour, but the overall problem with the movie is that its efforts to avoid the clichés of the genre don’t always work. And when you have a character who needs to learn to walk again but on prosthetic legs, and that aspect is reduced to a smattering of scenes, that raises another issue: just what is the movie’s focus if it isn’t that?

Rating: 6/10 – neither great nor awful but somewhere maddeningly in between, Stronger cleaves to audience expectations of what is, in cinematic terms, a very familiar story, and only manages to deviate from it when examining Jeff and Erin’s relationship; good performances all round help to alleviate the feeling of déjà vu that pervades the material and which holds it back from being more effective, leaving the whole thing feeling like a missed opportunity, and a curious one at that.

CBGB (2013)

05 Wednesday Jul 2017

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D: Randall Miller / 101m

Cast: Alan Rickman, Malin Akerman, Justin Bartha, Richard de Klerk, Johnny Galecki, Kyle Gallner, Ashley Greene, Rupert Grint, Estelle Harris, Taylor Hawkins, Ryan Hurst, Stana Katic, Donal Logue, Joel David Moore, Ahna O’Reilly, Freddy Rodriguez, Mickey Sumner, Bradley Whitford, Josh Zuckerman

When a movie begins by telling its audience that punk began, not in the UK, but in a basement in New York in 1975, then you can be sure that the story you’re about to be told isn’t going to be too concerned with getting all the details absolutely correct. Admittedly, that’s the prerequisite of any movie portraying real events, but when it takes the time and effort to make such a statement (and such a questionable one at that), then it does tend to make the viewer question the validity of anything else that’s depicted. (That said, if you pay attention to the closing credits there’s an acknowledgment relating to Iggy Pop that’s more than a little relevant to any notions of fidelity to the truth.)

There’s a saying that, “If you remember the 60s, then you weren’t really there”. In truth you could substitute “the 60’s” for “CBGB’s” and the saying would retain the same meaning. And with the screenplay by director Randall Miller and Jody Savin not having been based on an article or a book or a memoir, how factual it all is becomes very much the issue. Because as a remembrance of (mostly) good times past, CBGB is a massive disappointment. This should have been a celebration of a period when underground music was making a bigger and bigger impact on the wider music industry, and helping to shape the future for emerging artists. Instead it quickly defaults into telling a piecemeal tale where CBGB’s owner, Hilly Kristal (Rickman), continuously mismanages the club to the point of near-bankruptcy, scenes revisit the same issues time and time again, characters pop in and out of the narrative with little reference as to why they’re there, and the viewer gets to play Spot the Famous Band Before They Were Famous. And that’s about it.

As an evocation of the late Seventies/early Eighties, CBGB rarely strays far enough away from its Bowery location to give any indication of the musical and cultural changes that were going on elsewhere, and relies on newspaper articles being read out to provide any sense that the club is having any greater impact than at a local level. As a result, the movie maintains an insular and largely passive tone that makes even the more dramatic events – a New York shakedown, band The Dead Boys crashing their tour bus – feel bland and uninteresting to watch. Part of the issue is with Kristal himself, who is portrayed as a man travelling the path of least resistance, and who seems passively intent on ruining the most successful business he’s ever had (when we meet him he’s in bankruptcy court for the second time). While his business partner, Merv (Logue), and daughter Lisa (Greene), continually berate him for ignoring the basics of owning a club (like paying the rent), Kristal floats above it all, oblivious to the risks to the club and focusing on the bands coming through his doors looking for a stage on which to express themselves.

With the main storyline – how did Kristal manage to keep the club open for so long? – failing to provide anything meaningful for the viewer to connect with, it falls to the music to add some flair and excitement to proceedings. However, despite the level of talent that appeared at the club over the years, and despite some very obvious choices – Television, Talking Heads, Blondie, Ramones, The Police – the musical interludes lack for energy, even when Justin Bartha throws himself around as Dead Boys’ singer Stiv Bators. When even the music that’s meant to be celebrated can’t make a difference to things then it’s time to close the club (or shutdown the movie) and send everyone home.

Thanks to the script the performances have no option but to range from adequate to perfunctory. Rickman is on good form in terms of expressing Kristal’s blasé attitude, but it ends up being the whole performance. Everyone else is a secondary character, with Logue, Greene and Hawkins (as Iggy Pop) faring best, and the rest contributing what are mostly extended cameos. Rodriguez is the junkie Kristal gives a kitchen job to, Grint looks out of place as Dead Boys’ bassist Cheetah Chrome (who really cameos as a cab driver), Harris is Kristal’s mother who when told Stiv Bators has been known to jerk off into Hilly’s Chili remarks that she’s “had worse in her mouth”, and Akerman is so stiff as Debbie Harry you’d be happy for the real thing to step in and take over (and despite Harry being seventy-two). When you have such a great cast and they’re given so little to work with, it definitely qualifies as a waste.

As alluded to above, the fault lies squarely with Miller and Savin’s script, and Miller’s direction. With the screenplay lacking purpose, and much of the dialogue sounding like the co-writers’ did a first pass and kept to what they’d written, there are too many occasions where what’s being said seems trivial and/or unlikely given the circumstances on screen. Miller seems unable to inject any verve or energy into proceedings, and the movie trails along in a functional, pedestrian way that saps what little vigour the movie does possess. By the movie’s end it’s hard to work out what the motive was behind making it, but if it was in tribute to Hilly Kristal and his championing of the underground music scene, then it’s unfortunate that his influence is best exemplified by an end credits sequence that shows real-life footage from the 2002 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony. Here we get to see Talking Heads accepting their award and inviting Kristal up on stage with them, and then thanking him for his support. Sadly, it’s the most poignant and moving moment in the whole movie.

Rating: 4/10 – lacking a clear purpose and repeating itself too often, CBGB at least has a killer soundtrack to fall back on – and thank heavens for that; less a biopic than a slow trawl through a defining era in the history of rock music, the movie spends too much time trying to define the iconic nature of the club, and in doing so, fails to portray adequately its influence on the wider music scene. (5/31)

Monthly Roundup – April 2017

30 Sunday Apr 2017

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Fifty Shades Darker (2017) / D: James Foley / 118m

Cast: Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, Eric Johnson, Marcia Gay Harden, Eloise Mumford, Bella Heathcote, Rita Ora, Luke Grimes, Victor Rasuk, Max Martini, Kim Basinger

Rating: 4/10 – Christian Grey (Dornan) successfully woos back Anastasia Steele (Johnson), tries to go “straight” in the bedroom, and then narrowly avoids an attempt on his life – and that’s it for Round Two; flashy and trashy at the same time, Fifty Shades Darker continues the series’ commitment to providing two hours of inane, tedium-inducing material each time, and by never going as far as it might in the sexual activity department, making this yet another slickly produced teaser for the real thing.

A Street Cat Named Bob (2016) / D: Roger Spottiswoode / 103m

Cast: Luke Treadaway, Ruta Gedmintas, Joanne Froggatt, Anthony Head, Darren Evans, Beth Goddard, Ruth Sheen, Caroline Goodall, Bob the Cat

Rating: 7/10 – a recovering drug addict and talented busker, James Bowen (Treadaway), adopts a cat he calls Bob and in doing so finds a reason to stay off drugs and rebuild his life – with unexpected results; though A Street Cat Named Bob charts a particularly diffcult period in the life of the real James Bowen, the movie avoids being too depressing by emphasising the bond between Bob and his musician “owner”, and by resolutely aiming for feelgood, something at which it succeeds with a great deal of charm, and thanks to an endearing performance from Treadaway.

The Woman from China (1930) / D: Edward Dryhurst / 82m

Cast: Julie Suedo, Gibb McLaughlin, Frances Cuyler, Tony Wylde, Kiyoshi Takase

Rating: 7/10 – a Chinese criminal, Chung-Li (McLaughlin), kidnaps the girlfriend (Cuyler) of a ship’s lieutenant (Wylde) in order to satisfy his lust for her, but doesn’t reckon on one of his accomplices (Suedo) having feelings of her own for the same ship’s lieutenant; a late in the day silent movie, The Woman from China is a British production that has a Dickensian feel to it, narrowly avoids stereotyping its villain (very narrowly), and thanks to Dryhurst’s talent as a writer as well as a director, remains a well crafted thriller that is ripe for rediscovery.

We Go On (2016) / D: Jesse Holland, Andy Mitton / 85m

Cast: Annette O’Toole, Clark Freeman, Giovanna Zacarías, Jay Dunn, Laura Heisler, John Glover

Rating: 5/10 – Miles (Freeman) is terrified of dying and wants incontrovertible proof of life after death, so he offers a reward to anyone who can provide it, but the responses he gets aren’t exactly what he was expecting; a paranoid chiller that doesn’t quite have the focus it needs to be interesting throughout, We Go On nevertheless contains some really creepy moments, and a fiercely maternal performance from O’Toole that elevates the material whenever she’s on screen, but overall it falls short in too many areas, and particularly the way in which it’s been assembled, which leaves it feeling haphazard and hastily stitched together.

Yukon Vengeance (1954) / D: William Beaudine / 68m

Cast: Kirby Grant, Chinook, Monte Hale, Mary Ellen Kay, Henry Kulky, Carol Thurston, Parke McGregor, Fred Gabourie

Rating: 4/10 – when a lumber company’s wages keep being stolen while en route to the nearest town, Canadian Mountie Rod Webb (Grant) and his faithful sidekick Chinook are sent to investigate; a remake of Wilderness Mail (1935), Yukon Vengeance is also the last in a series of ten movies Grant and Chinook made together between 1949 and 1954, and is pleasant enough if you go in not expecting too much, but it’s hampered by poor performances from Hale and Kay, uninterested direction from Beaudine (usually much more reliable), and material that offers no surprises whatsoever (though that shouldn’t be a surprise either).

This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006) / D: Kirby Dick / 98m

With: Kirby Dick, Kimberly Peirce, Matt Stone, John Waters, Kevin Smith, Maria Bello, Wayne Kramer, David Ansen, Mary Harron, Allison Anders

Rating: 6/10 – moviemaker Kirby Dick decides to try and find out just what goes on behind the secretive doors of the Motion Picture Association of America, and hires a private investigator to do so, while also eliciting the opinions of moviemakers who have had run-ins with the MPAA; Dick adopts a partisan approach to the material, but in the end, This Film Is Not Yet Rated doesn’t discover anything that viewers couldn’t have worked out for themselves without seeing it, and wastes a lot of time with Dick’s choice of private investigator as they sit outside the MPAA offices and take down car number plates for very little return (both investigative and cinematic).

The Claydon Treasure Mystery (1938) / D: H. Manning Haynes / 64m

Cast: John Stuart, Garry Marsh, Annie Esmond, Campbell Gullan, Evelyn Ankers, Aubrey Mallalieu, Finlay Currie, Joss Ambler, Richard Parry, Vernon Harris, John Laurie

Rating: 5/10 – following a disappearance and a murder, crime writer Peter Kerrigan (Stuart) becomes involved in a centuries old mystery at a country house, while attempting to work out just who is willing to kill to benefit from said mystery; what could have been a nimble little murder mystery is let down by Haynes’ solemn direction, and too much repetition in the script, but The Claydon Treasure Mystery does feature a handful of entertaining performances and a clever solution to the mystery.

Delayed Action (1954) / D: John Harlow / 58m

Cast: Robert Ayres, June Thorburn, Alan Wheatley, Bruce Seton, Michael Balfour

Rating: 5/10 – a suicidal man (Ayres) agrees to play the part of a businessman to meet the crooked demands of another (Wheatley), and forfeit his life at the end of the agreement, but doesn’t reckon on having a reason to live – a woman (Thorburn) – when the time comes; a sprightly little crime drama, Delayed Action never really convinces the viewer that Ayres’ character would agree so readily to the offer made to him, and Ayres himself is a less than convincing actor in the role, but the short running time helps, and Wheatley’s arrogant, preening master criminal is the movie’s trump card.

The Night of the Party (1935) / D: Michael Powell / 61m

aka The Murder Party

Cast: Malcolm Keen, Jane Baxter, Ian Hunter, Leslie Banks, Viola Keats, Ernest Thesiger, Jane Millican, W. Graham Brown, Muriel Aked

Rating: 5/10 – at a dinner party, hated newspaper proprietor Lord Studholme (Keen) is murdered, but which one of the many guests – all of whom had reason to kill him – actually did the deed, and why?; Powell was still finding his feet as a director when he made The Night of the Party, and though much of it looks like a filmed stage play (which it was), it’s exactly the movie’s staginess that robs it of a lot of energy, and stops it from becoming as involving and engaging as other movies of its ilk, and that’s despite some very enjoyable performances indeed.

Office Christmas Party (2016) / D: Josh Gordon, Will Speck / 105m

Cast: Jason Bateman, Olivia Munn, T.J. Miller, Jennifer Aniston, Kate McKinnon, Courtney B. Vance, Jillian Bell, Rob Corddry, Vanessa Bayer, Randall Park

Rating: 5/10 – with their office being threatened with closure, manager Clay (Miller) and several of his staff decide to throw a massive Xmas party in the hope that it will help secure a contract with businessman Walter Davis (Vance) and so save everyone’s jobs; only fitfully amusing, Office Christmas Party probably sounded great as an idea, but in practice it strays too far from the original concept, and has its cast going firmly through the motions in their efforts to raise a laugh, although McKinnon (once again) stands out as an HR manager who makes being uptight the funniest thing in the whole misguided mess of a movie.

The Marine 5: Battleground (2017) / D: James Nunn / 91m

Cast: Mike Mizanin, Anna Van Hooft, Nathan Mitchell, Bo Dallas, Curtis Axel, Heath Slater, Naomi, Sandy Robson

Rating: 4/10 – now a paramedic, Jake Carter (Mizanin) finds himself trapped in an underground car park and fending off a motorcycle gang who are trying to kill the injured man (Mitchell) who has just killed their leader; five movies in and WWE Films have used a low budget/low return formula to ensure that The Marine 5: Battleground remains a dreary, leaden-paced “action” movie that features a lot more WWE Superstars than usual, more glaring plot holes than you can shove the Big Show through, and proof if any were needed that playing hyper-realised athletes every week isn’t a good training ground for acting in the movies, no matter how hard WWE tries to make it seem otherwise.

Incarnate (2016) / D: Brad Peyton / 91m

Cast: Aaron Eckhart, Carice van Houten, Catalina Sandino Moreno, David Mazouz, Keir O’Donnell, Matt Nable, Emily Jackson, Tomas Arana

Rating: 4/10 – a scientist-cum-paranormal investigator (Eckhart) can induce himself into the minds of people possessed by demons and cast them out, but he comes up against a stronger adversary than any he’s encountered before: the demon that took the lives of his wife and son; a neat twist on a standard possession/exorcism movie, Incarnate suffers from the kind of muddled plotting, heavyhanded sermonising, and stereotypical characterisations that hamper all these variations on a horror movie theme, and in doing so, marks itself out as another nail in the coffin of Eckhart’s mainstream career, and a movie that lacks substance, style, wit, and credibility.

Crime Doctor (1943) / D: Michael Gordon / 66m

Cast: Warner Baxter, Margaret Lindsay, John Litel, Ray Collins, Harold Huber, Don Costello, Leon Ames, Dorothy Tree

Rating: 7/10 – a man (Baxter) found unconscious at the side of the road wakes with no memory of his past, but over time builds a new life for himself as a leading criminal psychologist – until his own criminal past comes calling; the first in the Crime Doctor series is a solid, suspenseful movie bolstered by strong performances, a surprisingly detailed script, and good production values, making it an above average thriller and hugely enjoyable to watch.

Island of Doomed Men (1940) / D: Charles Barton / 68m

Cast: Peter Lorre, Rochelle Hudson, Robert Wilcox, Don Beddoe, George E. Stone, Kenneth MacDonald, Charles Middleton

Rating: 6/10 – a Government agent (Wilcox) allows himself to be arrested and imprisoned in an effort to make it to an island owned by sadistic diamond mine owner Stephen Danel (Lorre), and then expose Danel’s use of ex-cons and parolees as slave labour; a seedy, florid atmosphere is encouraged and exploited by Barton as Island of Doomed Men allows Lorre to give one of his more self-contained yet intense performances, and which also shows that some Production Code-era movies could still be “exciting” for reasons that only modern day audiences would appreciate – probably.

Anybody’s Nightmare (2001) / D: Tristram Powell / 97m

Cast: Patricia Routledge, Georgina Sutcliffe, Thomas Arnold, Nicola Redmond, David Calder, Malcolm Sinclair, William Armstrong, Rashid Karapiet, Louisa Milwood-Haigh, Scott Baker

Rating: 5/10 – the true story of Sheila Bowler (Routledge) who in the early Nineties was arrested, tried and convicted of the death of her late husband’s aunt (despite a clear lack of evidence), and who spent the next four years fighting to have her conviction overturned; a miscarriage of justice story bolstered by Routledge’s dignified, sterling performance, Anybody’s Nightmare betrays its British TV movie origins too often for comfort, features some truly disastrous acting (step forward Thomas Arnold and Louisa Milwood-Haigh), but does make each twist and turn of Bowler’s legal case as shocking as possible, and in the end, proves once again that truth really is stranger than fiction.

Christine (2016)

20 Thursday Apr 2017

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D: Antonio Campos / 119m

Cast: Rebecca Hall, Michael C. Hall, Tracy Letts, Maria Dizzia, J. Smith-Cameron, Timothy Simons, Kim Shaw, John Cullum

In the Spring of 1974, Christine Chubbuck (Hall) was a twenty-nine year old news reporter working for Channel WXLT in Sarasota, Florida. She was single, she lived with her mother, Peg (Smith-Cameron), and she had been given her own talk show on WXLT called Suncoast Digest, in which she would focus on local people and community activities. But Christine also suffered from depression, and could be up one moment and down the next (nowadays she would likely be diagnosed as having bi-polar disorder). Her depression could lead to extreme mood swings, and she would often push people away even though the few friendships she had were very important to her. And she regularly complained that the news stories she, and the station, were covering weren’t interesting enough, and that the station should focus more on regular people’s lives and what those lives were really like.

This kept her at odds with news director Mike Simmons (Letts), and the two would have regular run-ins as Christine tried to emphasise the various ways she felt the station wasn’t living up to its potential. Simmons wanted “juicier” stories about murder and other crimes; Christine felt the station should focus more on local people and the drama inherent in their lives. Simmons didn’t. Also at this time, the owner of WXLT, Bob Anderson (Cullum), was looking for two of the news team to transfer to Baltimore to a new station he’d recently purchased. Lead anchor George Peter Ryan (Hall) was a likely candidate, but Christine felt that she could be the other person Anderson was looking for.

Christine’s determination to be that other person led her to make some questionable decisions in relation to her work, and she came close to alienating Simmons for good. When she discovered that she wouldn’t be going to Baltimore (even after speaking directly to Anderson), Christine’s depression seemed to be under control. Her mood swings disappeared, she was more agreeable to her fellow co-workers, and she apologised to Simmons. She also asked to helm a Suncoast Digest piece direct to camera, something she’d never done before. Simmons agreed, and on the morning of 15 July 1974, Christine became a news story herself…

In telling the last few months in the life of Christine Chubbuck, Antonio Campos and screenwriter Craig Shilowich have fashioned the kind of Seventies-based journalistic enquiry that wouldn’t look out of place when compared to similar movies made at the time. With its drab Seventies decor and often drabber costume design (brown was definitely the colour back then), Christine pays homage to an era when news reporting in the US was heavily community-based – parochial even – and sensationalism was just beginning to take hold (when one of Christine’s reports is bumped in favour of a murder outside their area, she’s informed it’s because it’s what the viewers want to see). The movie eloquently and confidently recreates the period (in all its dreary glory), and provides a perfect backdrop for its tale of a real-life news reporter who could never understand why her work wasn’t as well-regarded as she expected.

Christine’s issues at work were exacerbated by her mental health issues, and the movie spends a lot of time reinforcing the idea that she was unwell. There are references to a previous “episode” that occurred before she and her mother moved to Sarasota; Christine herself acknowledges at times her own inability to connect with the people around her (she seems more confident with strangers, something that’s noted but not examined too closely); and her continual on-again, off-again reactions to her colleagues speak effectively of someone struggling to make sense of her place in the harried world of news journalism.

That Christine Chubbuck suffered from a variety of mental health issues is clear from Shilowich’s sympathetic and engrossing screenplay, and Hall gives a bravura performance, imbuing the troubled newswoman’s lack of social skills, and her off-kilter idea of professional balance with a scary, aggressive approach that initially makes her a hard character to like. But with the knowledge that she is ill, the movie is able to provide a sympathetic hook for the audience to hold on to, even when Christine is being manipulative and horrible to her mother, berating Simmons for treating her badly, or when she mistreats her best friend and colleague, Jean (Dizzia).Through all this and more, Hall never loses sight of the woman who is trapped behind the cold veneer of mental illness, and whose sense of self-worth is only as strong as the approbation she receives from the people around her (and which she then refutes). It’s an often distressing performance, and one that’s tempered by a refusal to soften the blow of certain scenes and images (it also makes you wonder how on earth Meryl Streep could have received an Oscar nomination for Florence Foster Jenkins when Hall’s portrayal is on another level entirely).

Other aspects of Christine’s personality, character and history are explored, such as the work she did with children with intellectual disabilities, adopting a puppet show approach to teaching them life skills. The movie uses these shows to explore the depth of Christine’s own feelings about various topics, and they retain an added poignancy thanks to the knowledge that though Christine is passing on sound advice, the viewer is aware that it’s advice she herself won’t be able to follow. In a scene where Ryan takes her to a trancendental analysis meeting, Christine expresses all the things that are wrong with her life, including the lack of a partner and/or children. This is the crux of the matter: she doesn’t want to be alone anymore. She’s fast approaching thirty, is to all intents and purposes alone in her life, can’t see a way forward, and decides on a course of action that will deal with everything that contributes to her being depressed.

Anyone aware of Christine Chubbuck and what she did that baleful July morning in 1974, will already know the movie’s outcome, but what’s remarkable about the period before that day, and the way that both Shilowich and Campos treat it, is that it’s not until the last ten or twelve minutes that Christine’s fate is sealed. There are a couple of foreshadowings that viewers who are “in the dark” may well pick up on, but as well as its self-destructive mental health theme, this is the story of a woman fighting for recognition in an industry that was inherently sexist, and which was on the verge of becoming less conventional and more exploitative. This subplot is given enough screen time that it adds to the sense of Christine being beleaguered from all sides, and her efforts to break free and get to Baltimore all the more understandable. But it’s also Christine’s last chance to salvage something from her time at WXLT, and it’s only then that her “solution” presents itself. With both her personal and professional lives coming to a standstill, her decision has an inevitability about it that the movie has avoided delving into up until then.

Throughout, Campos’ direction is solid, sympathetic and invigorating. He wisely keeps the focus on Hall, while giving the likes of Letts and Michael C. Hall plenty of room to flesh out their characters and make them as credible as they can (in reality, neither Ryan nor Simmons had as much involvement in Christine’s life as they do here, and sometimes it shows). The hustle and bustle of the newsroom is downplayed in favour of effective character beats, while Joe Anderson’s muted yet moody cinematography is a perfect match for the emotional troubles Christine experiences. There’s a whole lot of heart and craft here, and as an examination of one person’s bitter disappointment with the hand Life has dealt her, it’s also painfully affecting.

Rating: 8/10 – with a mesmerising and compelling performance from Hall (a career best in fact), and a wealth of sincerity and compassion when it comes to its central character, Christine is a remarkable movie let down only by its lack of back story, and some repetition in Christine’s dealings with Simmons; absorbing and vivid, and with a sly streak of humour running throughout, it’s also a movie that refuses to pass judgment on her, and which does its best to honour her memory without sensationalising it, something she would most likely have approved of.

The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki (2016)

25 Saturday Feb 2017

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Original title: Hymyilevä mies

D: Juho Kuosmanen / 92m

Cast: Jarkko Lahti, Oona Airola, Eero Milonoff, Joanna Haartti, Esko Barquero, Elma Milonoff, Leimu Leisti, Hilma Milonoff, John Bosco Jr

Shot in gorgeous black and white, The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki opens in Finland in 1962. Olli (Lahti) is an amateur boxer turned professional whose manager, Elis Ask (Milonoff), is on the verge of clinching a deal that will see Olli fight in a bout against the World Boxing Association featherweight champion, Davey Moore (Bosco Jr). If it goes ahead, it will be the biggest sporting event in Finnish history. But Olli has other things on his mind, particularly his friend Raija Jänkä (Airola). At a wedding they both attend, Olli discovers he’s attracted to her, but at first he doesn’t know what to do or say about his new feelings. When the bout is agreed, Olli finds himself too busy to spend much time with Raija, who is reduced to the role of onlooker by Elis’s insistence that Olli focus on the bout and nothing else.

There’s also the issue of Olli’s weight, which needs to come down in order for him to be able to fight, but which he doesn’t seem to be concentrating on. With Elis arranging for a documentary film crew to record Olli’s preparations, it’s a further distraction for the boxer, and adds to the dissociation he feels with Raija. She too begins to feel the same thing, as Elis’ behaviour pushes her further and further away from Olli, almost to the point where she feels that she’s in the way. Meanwhile, Olli is forced to attend various dinners and promotional photo-shoots, adding to the disenchantment he’s feeling about the whole process. As the bout draws nearer, Raija returns to her home town, while Olli becomes increasingly withdrawn.

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Unable to train any further, Olli follows Raija and declares his feelings for her. Giving Elis no option, he stays with Raija and trains at his own pace, even fighting to get his weight down. At the weigh-in he just comes in under the required weight, and afterwards he proposes to Raija. Buoyed by this he approaches the bout with a renewed sense of optimism. And as he enters the ring, the stage is set for a career- and life-defining moment – but will it prove to be the happiest day of his life?

If you’re not Finnish, and more specifically, up to speed on Finland’s boxing history, then it’s unlikely that you’ll have heard of Olli Mäki. His career was a succession of ups and downs, beginning with his winning the European lightweight title as an amateur in 1959, his bout with Moore, and his European Boxing Union light welterweight title win in 1964. He continued boxing until 1973 when he retired to become a boxing coach and manager. At first glance, his life doesn’t seem to warrant a biopic being made out of one particular period in his life, even if it does include a championship title bout. But this is a boxing movie that isn’t about boxing, even though it inhabits that world. Instead, director Kuosmanen (making his full-length feature debut) and co-writer Mikko Myllylahti have turned their attention onto Mäki himself, his doubts and fears and longings outside the ring, and in doing so, have wrought an accomplished, intelligent, and compassionate portrait of a man fighting for more than just a title.

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From the beginning, Mäki seems bemused and oh-so-bored by all the media circus that surrounds him, a necessary evil he must endure on his way to the title bout. But he knows the ropes as it were, and goes along with Elis’ conditions and demands, trusting in the man who’s got him to this point. But the eagle-eyed viewer will soon spot that Elis is working as much to his own agenda as he is for Olli, and a scene late on where Elis is forced to take his children (and Mäki) with him on a rainy night to visit some of his backers, leaves the distinct feeling that there’s some form of corruption going on behind the scenes. But it’s enough to know that it’s there, because wisely, Kuosmanen doesn’t let this side trip upset the delicate balance he’s established by focusing on Mäki’s warring emotions.

Mäki’s dilemma revolves around whether he should be a lover or a fighter, or whether he can be both. It’s clear that he wants to be both, but if he has to make a choice – and an irrevocable one at that – then it’s obvious that he’ll be a lover. But boxing still has a hold over him, one that’s stronger than his loyalty to Elis, and letting go isn’t as easy as he may have believed. It takes Raija’s complete absence from his training camp to push him in the right direction, and for a moment the movie teeters on the edge of discarding the title fight altogether in favour of a happy ending. But Raija, despite her reservations about the world of boxing, believes in Mäki, and it’s this that allows him to return to his training and make the weigh-in. What happens next may not be entirely unpredictable, and definitely not if you’re familiar with Mäki’s career, but it has a pleasing symmetry with what’s gone before.

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As the eponymous boxer, Lahti wears a worn-down expression for the most part, but it’s in keeping with Mäki’s bemused resignation, and the actor inhabits the role with a weary sincerity. He also makes Mäki’s coiled physicality a part of his performance, as if the character is waiting for the right moment to explode but isn’t quite sure – outside of the ring at least – when that should be. As Raija, Airola (who in certain shots looks like Marion Cotillard’s younger sister) has an air of detachment and melancholy that again suits the movie’s mood and her character’s dwindling sense of importance when measured against Mäki’s training regime. But she also gets a chance to explore Raija’s more winsome, frivolous side in a party scene that fully explains why Mäki falls in love with her. As the main rival for Mäki’s “affections”, Milonoff is equally as good as his co-stars, portraying Elis as a man desperately trying to hide how much this fight means to him both professionally and personally. It could have been a two-dimensional role in comparison to Lahti and Airola’s, but Milonoff takes the bare bones of what appears to be a stock character and fleshes him out with sympathy and understanding.

Kuosmanen’s decision to make The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki in black and white proves to be a perfect choice for the material, and the depth and the richness of the images is further ensured by his use of a Kodak film stock that was never meant for feature length movies. The result is a movie that is frequently beautiful to watch, and which offers the viewer a variety of arresting images. Kuosmanen makes a number of other, equally important decisions, from the movie’s disciplined, elegant framing to the careful way in which he teases out each of the main characters’ feelings and desires in such a way that leaves them vulnerable and yet still secure. Add in themes around personal sacrifice and professional responsibility, as well as the pressures of an entire country’s expectations of an individual, and you have a movie that quietly and effortlessly draws in the viewer and rewards them in a variety of unexpected ways, not the least of which is a dry, diffident sense of humour.

Rating: 9/10 – a movie that speaks to the heart and tells a wonderful love story in the process, The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki is a modest, yet enthralling movie that somehow failed to be nominated for an Oscar this year (though it did win the Prize Un Certain Regard at Cannes last year); putting all that aside, this should be on everyone’s list of must-see movies, and a welcome reminder that sometimes it’s the movies that receive the least fanfare that can often be the ones to have the most impact.

Lion (2016)

19 Sunday Feb 2017

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D: Garth Davis / 115m

Cast: Dev Patel, Rooney Mara, Nicole Kidman, David Wenham, Sunny Pawar, Abhishek Bharate, Priyanka Bose, Divian Ladwa, Deepti Naval, Tannishtha Chatterjee, Nawazuddin Siddiqui

If you watch enough movies you soon learn that the world is full of inspiring true life stories where people from all walks of life overcome seemingly insurmountable odds in order to achieve a particular personal or professional goal. In 2016, movies based on true stories included the likes of Hacksaw Ridge, The Finest Hours, The Infiltrator, and Sully. And then there’s Lion, the story of a young Indian boy, Saroo (Pawar), who finds himself lost and alone in a part of India he doesn’t know, and who ends up being adopted by an Australian couple, the Brierleys (Kidman, Wenham). Twenty years later, Saroo (Patel) decides to go in search of his birth family: his older brother Guddu, his mother Kamla, and younger sister Shekila.

As expected, Lion is a movie of two halves. In the first we meet Saroo and Guddu (Bharate), brothers who steal coal from trains that they then sell on so as to be able to afford groceries. On one such mission they travel to a train station, where they end up separated. Saroo boards a train in the hope of finding Guddu, but he falls asleep. When he wakes the train is moving and he’s unable to get off until it arrives at its destination: Calcutta. Though he’s taken in by a kindly young woman, Noor (Chatterjee), Saroo flees from her home when a man she knows, Rama (Siddiqui), appears set on selling Saroo into the sex trade. Eventually, he finds himself in the care of the authorities and lodging in a children’s home. Some time later, Mrs Sood (Naval), from the Indian Society for Sponsorship and Adoption, tells him that an Australian couple want to adopt him. Saroo travels to Hobart, Tasmania, where he meets his adoptive parents, John and Sue Brierley. He settles in, and the Brierleys also adopt another orphaned Indian boy, Mantosh.

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This first half is compelling stuff, due largely to Pawar’s winning presence, and the sympathy his plight elicits. From the moment Saroo falls asleep on a platform bench, and despite his brother’s instruction to stay there, it’s obvious that it’s all going to go wrong (there wouldn’t be much of a movie otherwise). But this awareness in the viewer is what makes it work so well. Watching Saroo calling for his brother – and knowing he won’t appear or answer – adds to the sense of isolation that Saroo will soon begin to feel, and it’s one of those situations we can all appreciate. And when he falls asleep on the train that will take him far away from home, it’s especially heartbreaking. As the young Saroo, Pawar’s performance is pitch perfect, his natural way in front of the camera making it easy to identify with Saroo and hope that he doesn’t come to any harm. Pawar plays him as a cheeky, happy-go-lucky child at first, but when things become more serious, he’s more than able to display the sadness and dismay inherent in Saroo’s situation.

In the second half, Saroo is now studying hotel management in Melbourne, and begins a relationship with fellow student, Lucy (Mara). At a party with friends, Saroo experiences a flashback to his childhood, and it proves to be the first of many. Lucy and his friends suggest he uses Google Earth to try and find his hometown in India. But the town name he remembers doesn’t exist, and the only memory he has of the station where he last saw Guddu is that there was a rain tower there, something not uncommon at Indian railway stations. As his search continues, and with less and less luck or progress as time goes by, Saroo’s relationship with Lucy begins to suffer. Eventually, Saroo finds a clue on Google Earth that points him in the right direction, and brings the prospect of finding his Indian family even closer.

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With the movie’s first half proving so compelling and so emotionally effective, it becomes something of a surprise when the second half appears to be doing its best to undo all the good work of the first. As an adult, Saroo’s floppy-haired, well-liked personality soon gives way to miserable, semi-tortured whinger as his efforts to find his birth family fail to provide the results he wants, and his disappointment causes him to treat Lucy like a stranger, and his adopted brother Mantosh (Ladwa) with callous disregard. It’s this transition that doesn’t make sense dramatically, and it’s an issue that Luke Davies’ otherwise exemplary script never addresses satisfactorily. The why of Saroo’s change in behaviour may well be due to accrued frustration, but why he should deliberately jeopardise his relationships with those closest to him remains a mystery, one greater than if he’ll succeed in his search. Not even Patel, normally a perceptive and thoughtful actor, can’t make anything of this turnaround, and for a long stretch any sympathy for the character that the viewer has, is in danger of being lost for good.

The second half is also where the script trots out too many subplots that don’t always add up to a coherent whole. Mantosh is seen as having issues surrounding his role in the Brierley family, but the reasons for these are never explained, while the reason for the Brierleys having adopted two Indian boys instead of having their own children is given at a point where Sue’s health is precarious. Sue’s health issues, though, are left hanging so that Saroo can head off to India with her encouragement and blessing, but not with anything resembling a backward glance. The whole pace of the second half is off as a result of these narrative fumbles, and some scenes feel as if they should have been excised in favour of a shorter, yet more dramatically sound approach. When you lose interest in the main character’s search or journey because of how he behaves, then you know the movie’s doing something wrong.

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Making his feature debut, Garth Davis makes the most of the Indian settings, painting a portrait of life as seen through the eyes of the young Saroo – a world full of wonder (a kaleidoscope of butterflies, the taste of a cold fizzy drink), and a world full of danger (predatory sex traffickers). Davis is on solid ground here, depicting Saroo’s journey with heart and compassion, and making it clear just how lucky Saroo was to be adopted. Many of the scenes in Calcutta show Saroo surrounded quite literally by the rush and press of its populace, but Davis is quick to show just how isolated he is at the same time. And he follows through with this idea with the adult Saroo, but instead of Saroo becoming isolated through the vagaries of Fate, this time he becomes isolated because of what he does. It reinforces the idea of Saroo not being settled in terms of his heritage and the connection he has with his past; he doesn’t want to continue being adrift.

Visually, Lion is often impressive to watch, alternating between the brooding, teeming city life of Calcutta, and the bright open spaces of Melbourne. Greig Fraser’s cinematography catches the mood precisely, his use of close ups in particular adding to the resonance of the story. Of course, those close ups wouldn’t be entirely as effective if it weren’t for the quality of the acting. As mentioned above, Patel has problems making Saroo credible in terms of his behaviour, but does a good job nevertheless. Mara makes a minimal impression because, one scene aside, her character is the standard girlfriend seen in too many other movies. As the Brierleys, Wenham is sidelined in favour of Kidman’s sterling performance, one that sees her regain some of the critical favour she’s lost in recent years. But if the movie “belongs” to anyone in the cast, it’s young Pawar, whose sweet, angelic features are difficult to resist, and even harder to ignore. Without him, Lion would not be as powerful as it is, or as rewarding.

Rating: 7/10 – let down by a second half that isn’t as focused as its first, Lion is still worth watching, but not as much as its various awards nominations – and wins – would have you believe; a true story that at least doesn’t preach to its audience, its tale is a remarkable one but in this version, not one that will necessarily linger too long in the memory.

The Founder (2016)

18 Saturday Feb 2017

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D: John Lee Hancock / 115m

Cast: Michael Keaton, Nick Offerman, John Carroll Lynch, Laura Dern, Linda Cardellini, B.J. Novak, Patrick Wilson, Kate Kneeland, Justin Randell Brooke, Griff Furst

For those of us who live outside the good ole US of A, the idea of the American Dream seems like a typically grandiose American proposition, as if the US is the only place where dreams can come true, where people can become anyone they want to be, or where success can be won if you work really hard to achieve it. At the risk of upsetting any American readers of thedullwoodexperiment, it’s a strange kind of conceit; in reality, what makes the States any different from anywhere else in the world when it comes to people achieving their dreams? The obvious answer is: nothing. But it’s an idea that many Americans believe wholeheartedly, and one that fuels the story of Ray Kroc (Keaton), the man who gave us McDonald’s, the corporate behemoth that grew out of one independent restaurant in San Bernardino, California, and now spans the globe.

When we first meet Kroc it’s 1954. He’s a milkshake mixer salesman who’s about as successful as a butcher at a vegan commune. But he’s his own boss so he keeps plugging away at it, facing rejection at every turn, when one day his secretary, June (Kneeland), tells him they’ve received an order for six mixers from a restaurant in San Bernardino, a place called McDonald’s. Surprised, he decides to visit the owners, Mac and Dick McDonald (Lynch, Offerman), and they elect to tell him their story, one that involves many false starts and setbacks in setting up a burger restaurant, until they realised that by stripping down the menu and speeding up the delivery time, they could maximise their sales. Kroc is astonished by how effective their business is, and finds he can’t stop thinking about it.

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The next day he proposes the brothers expand their business into a franchise. But they’ve tried this also, and it hasn’t worked, mostly because they were unable to guarantee the same quality of operation as at their own site. Kroc persuades them to let him take on the challenge, but fearful of what he might do in the process, they get him to sign a contract that states all changes must be agreed by them first. Kroc sets about building the McDonald’s brand but encounters problems when wealthy investors are involved. Instead he tries to attract middle-class couples who will work hard to make their franchise a success. Soon there are franchises opening all across the Midwest, but Kroc is getting little financial reward from it all. His contract gives him a very small percentage of any profits, despite the amount of effort he’s putting in, and the McDonald brothers won’t change the terms.

A chance encounter with a financial consultant, Harry Sonneborn (Novak), sees Kroc changing his approach to both his finances and his relationship with Mac and Dick. By focusing on the real estate needed by the franchisees, Kroc not only increases his own revenue, but is able to leverage his deal with the brothers to make changes to the overall operation, including replacing the ice cream in the milkshakes with powdered milk. The brothers resist, but by this stage, Kroc is effectively the face of McDonald’s to anyone who’s interested. And soon, he’s in a position to force out the brothers from their own business, and continue his expansion of the McDonald’s brand…

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Your reaction to The Founder is going to be based on one of two things: whether you feel Ray Kroc was right in the way that he treated the McDonald brothers, or whether you feel that he mistreated them. But Robert D. Siegel’s engaging script isn’t solely about fair or foul play, or whether Kroc is a hero or a villain (like a lot of people he’s both, depending on the circumstances). Rather, it’s also about the very thing Kroc mentions in his opening sales pitch to an off-screen customer, and later to various groups of potential franchisees: opportunity. Ray Kroc was in the right place at the right time, and he instinctively knew that creating a franchise was the way to go. He was blinkered in his attitude, dismissive of his critics, and willing to roll over anyone and anything to make the McDonald’s brand a nationwide success. As he tells the unfortunate Mac and Dick: “If I saw a competitor drowning, I’d shove a hose down his throat.”

Throughout the movie Kroc seizes on opportunity after opportunity, triumphing over every setback and potential obstacle until he gets what he wants. And although you may indeed feel that his treatment of the McDonald brothers was akin to bullying, there’s a kind of grim inevitability to the story that makes Kroc seem like an instrument of Fate. The question then becomes, if Ray Kroc hadn’t met the McDonald brothers, would their one restaurant have grown into a franchise operation with approximately thirty-six and a half thousand outlets worldwide? The movie makes it clear: no. And so the movie becomes about the how (the why is obvious). And if sharp practice is the order of the day, then that’s going to come with a side order of fries and a drink (preferably Coca-Cola).

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Inevitably, audiences will decide that Ray Kroc treated the McDonald brothers abominably, because that’s exactly how he treated them. The movie doesn’t shy away from this, or from his shoddy treatment of pretty much everyone around him, and particularly his long-suffering wife Ethel (Dern). As Kroc, Keaton is a mesmerising presence, tightly-wound, arrogant and determined. Even when he’s still, he looks as if fires are raging beneath his skin. In 1954, Kroc was fifty-two and suddenly possessed by an idea that would consume him until his death in 1984, and Keaton displays this “possession” as if it was a calling. But Keaton also shows the venal side of Kroc’s nature, the need to be seen to succeed after so many years toiling in fields of failure, and so the movie also becomes, however uncomfortably, about one man’s redemption through the mistreatment of others.

As the McDonald brothers, both Offerman (in a rare serious role) and Lynch provide equally good performances, showcasing the naïvete and increasing stubbornness that would prove their undoing, and see them forced – eventually – out of the restaurant business. Dern gives a quiet, controlled portrayal as Kroc’s wife, while there’s a cameo role for Wilson as an interested franchisee whose wife (Cardellini) attracts Kroc’s attention. It’s all set against a vibrant period backdrop that highlights the sense of immeasurable promise that the US held for itself in the Fifties, and Hancock marshals the various plot strands and storylines with skill, maintaining the movie’s forward momentum despite several occasions when exposition threatens to overwhelm everything. As a cautionary tale – be careful who you do business with – The Founder is a good example of inexperience (and some degree of pride) going before a fall. It may not be the most positive of messages, but then, not everyone or everything in this world is going to treat you as you yourself would like to be treated, something Ray Kroc, despite his faults, knew all along.

Rating: 8/10 – anchored by a strong, forceful performance by Keaton, The Founder is a judicious mix of history and biography that looks behind the scenes at the beginnings of a global corporation with insight and sincerity; whatever your feelings about the fast-food industry, or McDonald’s specifically, this won’t necessarily change your mind, but as an object lesson in getting what you want – at all costs – then this should be required viewing.

Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

06 Monday Feb 2017

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D: Mel Gibson / 139m

Cast: Andrew Garfield, Sam Worthington, Teresa Palmer, Vince Vaughn, Luke Bracey, Hugo Weaving, Rachel Griffiths, Luke Pegler, Ben Mingay, Firass Dirani, Michael Sheasby, Nico Cortez, Goran D. Kleut, Richard Roxburgh, Ori Pfeffer

The story of Desmond T. Doss (Garfield) is one of those stories that seems tailor made for a big screen adaptation. After a childhood incident where he nearly kills his older brother, Desmond takes the sixth commandment, thou shalt not kill, very much to heart. When the US enters the Second World War, and pretty much every other young man has enlisted, Desmond enlists as well, and is sent to Fort Jackson in South Carolina for his basic training, he immediately upsets the normal order of things by refusing to touch a rifle… or indeed, any weapon. Naturally this antagonises his fellow trainees, and they make life difficult for him, as does his instructor, Sergeant Howell (Vaughn), and commanding officer, Captain Glover (Worthington), who want to see the back of Doss and his religious beliefs (he’s also a Seventh Day Adventist).

But Doss endures everything the army can throw at him, and begins to earn the respect of his comrades. However, when he’s given a direct order to pick up a gun and he refuses, he finds himself facing a court-martial. Luckily, a last-minute intervention by his father (Weaving), sees Doss allowed to take part in the war as a medic and without having to carry a rifle. Soon, Glover’s men, including Doss, are shipped out to the Pacific, and specifically, the island of Okinawa, where they are tasked with climbing the cliff face of the Maeda Escarpment – otherwise known as Hacksaw Ridge – and take on the Japanese forces that are dug in there. Their first attack is unsuccessful and they’re forced to take shelter on the ridge overnight. The next day they’re driven back down the Escarpment, leaving dozens of injured and wounded men behind.

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Doss, however, refuses to leave them there. Over the next twenty-four hours he rescues seventy-five men, keeping them safe from Japanese patrols and when it’s safe to do so, lowering them down the cliff face to the amazement of the US soldiers below. Doss’ last rescue saves the life of Sergeant Howell, and he and an equally chastened Captain Glover, admit how wrong they’ve been about Doss and the courage he’s shown in sticking to his beliefs, and in saving so many men. The next day, another assault is launched. This time it’s Doss who is injured, and this time it’s his fellow soldiers who have to take care of him.

Doss’s heroism – and rescue of so many men – is told in a straightforward, linear fashion (its prologue aside), and is respectful of the man and his beliefs to such a degree that there’s a danger of his being a symbol rather than a fully fledged character. But thanks to a combination of Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight’s moving screenplay, Andrew Garfield’s impressive performance as Doss, and Mel Gibson’s equally impressive directing turn, Hacksaw Ridge never lionises Doss to the extent where he’s portrayed as an above average human being doing something extraordinary. Instead, Doss’s humility and keen sense of purpose keep him grounded firmly and effectively, and his sincerity is never doubted. He’s exactly the kind of man you want fighting alongside you in battle. Garfield – on somewhat of a religious roll with this and Silence (2016) – expresses Doss’s beliefs with a keen sense of how important his faith is to him, and gives a performance that is subtly nuanced, honest, and hugely sympathetic. When he’s saying to God, “Help me to get one more”, there’s no other line of dialogue in the movie that so perfectly encapsulates Doss’s character and personality, or his sense of personal responsibility.

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Garfield is helped and surrounded by a terrific supporting cast, from Weaving as Doss’s sad, alcoholic father, to Palmer’s girl-next-door who he falls in love with at first glance, and on to Bracey’s gung-ho soldier who accuses Doss of cowardice. Vaughn, who rarely strays from his comedy man-child persona, here does some of his best work in years as the gruff Sergeant Howell, berating his men in a toned-down version of R. Lee Ermey’s Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket (1987), and doing so with a thinly disguised layer of affection. On the home front, Palmer is suitably fresh and enticing as the love of Doss’s life, and Griffiths is appropriately supportive as his mother. Only Worthington, saddled with a stock character and some clumsy dialogue, fails to make an immediate impression (though once he’s on Doss’s side it’s easier for the viewer to be on his side too).

But overall, this is Gibson’s triumph through and through, a powerful, riveting war movie that features some of the most exhilarating and, at the same time, exhausting battle sequences since Saving Private Ryan (1998). But where Spielberg’s ground-breaking recreation of the Normandy landings was brutal and uncompromising, and featured someone – Tom Hanks’ Captain Miller – that the viewer could relate to during all the carnage, here Gibson switches perspectives between the US and Japanese soldiers almost at will, and in doing so, captures some of the true, overwhelming nature of hand-to-hand combat (while also seeming a little too pre-occupied with setting men on fire, images of which crop up time and again).

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But while the fierce exchanges at Hacksaw Ridge are given their due, Gibson is on equally solid ground during the sequences set in Doss’s home town of Lynchburg, Virginia, and at Fort Jackson, imbuing the Lynchburg scenes with a rosy, yet melancholy feeling, and then beginning to make things seem a little darker at Fort Jackson. By the time Doss reaches Okinawa, the viewer is left in no doubt that what follows will make Doss’s childhood trauma and boot camp humiliations seem like a walk in the park. It’s a slow build up as well, allowing the audience to get better acquainted with the men who’ll go into battle with Doss (and maybe not return), and to fully understand the dynamic between Doss and his father, and the bond between Doss and his fiancée, Dorothy.

Tales of heroism are often about the act or acts themselves, but here it’s “Doss the coward” (as he’s referred to) who is the focus. His determination, and over-riding desire to save life while everyone else is taking it, is embodied by Garfield’s praiseworthy performance, and further endorsed by the movie’s gung-ho, populist rhetoric. If it strays a little too close to feeling like a soap opera at times (especially in its scenes at Lynchburg), or unintentional melodrama, then Gibson is astute enough to bring it back from the brink. All of which makes Hacksaw Ridge one of the most “authentic-looking” war movies ever made, as well as being a fine tribute to the exploits of a man whose beliefs are truly inspirational.

Rating: 8/10 – bolstered by Simon Duggan’s bold cinematography, and Barry Robison’s exemplary production design, Hacksaw Ridge sees Gibson the director on fine form, and making one of the most impressive war movies of recent years; harrowing, visceral, and yet uplifting at the same time, the battle sequences are the movie’s main draw, though the earlier scenes contain enough emotional clout as well to balance things out, all of which provides viewers with one of the most fearless and potent true stories of 2016.

Jackie (2016)

30 Monday Jan 2017

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D: Pablo Larraín / 100m

Cast: Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Billy Crudup, Greta Gerwig, John Hurt, Richard E. Grant, Caspar Phillipson, Beth Grant, John Carroll Lynch, Max Casella

A week after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (Phillipson) in November 1963, his widow, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (Portman) – otherwise known as Jackie – summoned the journalist Theodore H. White (Crudup) to her home at Hyannis Port. White had won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction with his book The Making of the President, 1960, an account of the election that saw Kennedy win the Presidency. Jackie’s idea was for White to write an article that would be published in Life magazine, and which would show a correlation between her late husband’s administration and King Arthur’s court at Camelot. White agreed, and guided by Jackie’s suggestions, he wrote a thousand word essay that stressed the Camelot comparison.

This is the basis for Jackie, the latest movie to pick over the bones of Kennedy’s assassination and its wake. By using White’s “interview” with Jackie, the movie shows how Jackie dealt with the demands of suddenly becoming a former First Lady, balancing her public persona with her private feelings, arranging her husband’s funeral, and most important of all, protecting and promoting his legacy. It’s this that forms most of the narrative, as Jackie seeks to cement Kennedy’s place in history. Even riding in a hearse with brother-in-law Bobby Kennedy (Sarsgaard) (and this shortly after Kennedy’s body has been released from Parkland Hospital), Jackie is keen to make the point that nobody remembers James A. Garfield or William McKinley, both assassinated while in office, but they do remember Abraham Lincoln – and all because of his legacy as a President.

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But her husband’s legacy isn’t the only thing she appears focused on. There’s also the matter of what she regards as “the truth”. She wants the American public to see the full horror of what she experienced on 22 November 1963; to this end she doesn’t change out of that famous pink Chanel suit she wore on the day when she’s given the opportunity, and even though it’s spattered with her husband’s blood. She keeps it on for the rest of the day – at Parkland Hospital, during Lyndon B. Johnson’s impromptu inauguration, at the airport in Washington (where she refuses to leave by the back of the plane so as to avoid the reporters), and finally in the White House, where she wanders the various rooms as if only now beginning to come to terms with the enormity of what happened earlier that day in Dallas, Texas.

In the days that follow, we see Jackie behave erratically but with some deep-rooted purpose that only she understands, tackling the issue of whether or not to walk behind the coffin, and what she’ll do once she leaves the White House. She confides in one of her retinue, Nancy Tuckerman (Gerwig), one of the few people who can raise her spirits and bring a smile to Jackie’s face, and a priest, Father Richard McSorley (Hurt), who offers her spiritual comfort. But she remains almost defiantly isolated, determined to continue in her own way, and against the wishes of the new administration when it matters.

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In focusing on Jackie in the hours and days following Kennedy’s assassination, the movie gives the viewer the opportunity to eavesdrop on the very private grief of a very public person, someone who put on a brave face for the cameras, but who also kept herself at a distance, despite wanting people to see “the truth”. It’s this dichotomy that makes Jackie the person endlessly fascinating to observe, and Jackie the movie somewhat disappointing in terms of the narrative. We see Jackie at various points, both in time and in place, throughout the movie. There are scenes in Dallas, in Washington, inside the White House, at Hyannis Port, but many of them feel like snippets of memory, connected discretely to each other by the random nature of Jackie’s thoughts and emotions. When she and White (known only as the Journalist, for some reason, in the credits) sit down to discuss the article, their conversation often goes off at a tangent, and Noah Oppenheim’s screenplay encourages this, as if it will give us a better understanding of Jackie in those four days between JFK’s death and his funeral. But it’s obvious: she’s trying to weather those four days as best she can until she can grieve properly, away from prying eyes.

With the script trying to add layers where they’re not needed, it’s left to Natalie Portman to save the movie from its all-too-clever design, and deliver a nigh-on faultless performance, burrowing under Jackie’s skin and finding the nerve centre of someone who was never entirely comfortable being in the public spotlight, but who instinctively knew the public’s perception of JFK as a great President – hence the parallel with Camelot – needed to be kindled as quickly as possible after his death, and that she was the only one who could do it. Portman portrays this single-mindedness with a quiet intensity, perfectly capturing Jackie’s “feisty” nature in private, and her more vulnerable, debutante persona in front of the cameras and/or reporters’ notebooks. There are moments in the movie when you could be forgiven for thinking that Jackie is “absent” from the room, or a conversation. But Portman’s portrayal is more subtle than that, and she gauges these “absences” with an acute awareness that a character’s stillness or silence often means more than is seen on the surface.

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If there’s one problem with Portman’s magnificent performance, it’s that it overshadows everything else the movie attempts or gets right. Jackie, ultimately, stands or falls thanks to Portman’s efforts, because without her command of the character (and Jackie’s odd accent), the movie lacks little else to keep the audience’s attention from wandering. Making his first English language movie, Chilean director Larraín displays an aptitude for scenes of sombre regret, and along with Portman fleshes out Jackie’s character to impressive effect, but there still remains the feeling that Jackie (the person) has been assembled from random aspects of her personality that seem a good fit for the narrative rather than a true representation of what she was really like at the time. At best, this is an interpretation of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy; at worst it’s an impression.

On the technical side, Jackie flits between looking stunning, and looking bland depending on the requirements of the script, and the budget. The interiors of the White House, faithfully recreated in a studio outside Paris, France, are dazzling examples of what can be achieved when you have the talents of production designer Jean Rabasse, art director Halina Gebarowicz, and set decorator Véronique Melery on board. And yet, if you contrast these wonderful sets with the motorcade sequences, it’s like the difference between day and night, with the scenes in Dallas looking like they’ve been shot on a closed stretch of road and with only two cars available for filming. And despite the best efforts of cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine, the movie never overcomes these disparities. In contrast, Mica Levi’s tonal, somewhat sepulchral score is a good match for the material, and acts as an emotional undercurrent to Jackie’s grief and displacement.

Rating: 8/10 – fans of low budget independent dramas will enjoy Jackie for its slow, measured pace, refusal to explain everything that’s going on (with Jackie herself), and Portman’s exquisitely detailed performance; an attempt at an intimate portrayal of a very private person, the movie glides majestically along for most of its running time, and gives the impression of being more meanngful than it actually is, but it still has a lot to offer both the casual and the more interested viewer.

Race (2016)

30 Monday May 2016

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Race

D: Stephen Hopkins / 134m

Cast: Stephan James, Jason Sudeikis, Jeremy Irons, Carice van Houten, Eli Goree, Shanice Banton, David Kross, Jonathan Higgins, Tony Curran, Barnaby Metschurat, Chantel Riley, William Hurt, Glynn Turman

Made with the support of Jesse Owens’ family, Race follows Owens as he enrols at Ohio State University in 1933, meets athletics coach Larry Snyder who teaches him how to be a better sprinter, and on through until his appearance at the 1936 Olympics, held in Berlin. It’s a powerful story, and Owens’ performance at the Games is legendary… which makes Race all the more surprising for how tame it is, and how unsure it is in what it wants to say.

As biopics go, it’s all standard stuff. We see Owens (James) as a young man saying goodbye to his sweetheart (and mother of his child), Ruth (Banton) before he heads off to Ohio State University. Once there, he encounters a predictable amount of systemic and endemic racism from pupils and staff alike, but concentrates on what he can do on the running track. Attracting the attention of athletics coach Larry Snyder (Sudeikis), Owens dispels any doubts about his abilities by matching the fastest recorded time in the 100 metre dash, and doing it as casually as if it were just “one of those things”. It’s not long before Snyder is talking about the 1936 Olympics, and Owens representing his country in Nazi Germany.

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Before then there’s the small matter of the 1935 Big Ten track meet in Ann Arbor, Michigan where Owens’ set three world records and tied a fourth in under an hour, his marriage to Ruth, and the political manoeuvrings that saw the US agree to compete in the 1936 Olympics once their envoy, construction magnate Avery Brundage (Irons), had negotiated terms with Dr Goebbels (Metschurat). With these things in place, Owens and the US team arrive in Berlin and begin preparations for the Games. Once they begin, it doesn’t take Owens long to disprove the Nazis’ idea of Aryan supremacy. He wins four gold medals: in the 100 metres, the 200 metres, the broad (long) jump, and the 4×100 metre relay (which was ironic as he replaced a Jewish runner who was dropped thanks to last-minute political expediency). History is made, and in the most bittersweet of circumstances.

Race covers all this, and more, but fails to make it interesting for the viewer, instead falling back on the kind of biopic clichés that were old back in the era Owens was breaking track records like they were nothing of importance. It also tries to cram in too much in the way of subplots, particularly in the way that Leni Riefenstahl (van Houten) goes about filming the Games, and often in defiance of Goebbels and his indifference to her efforts. Riefenstahl’s presence in the movie is surprising, as the movie could have worked well enough without her. Instead we’re treated to Riefenstahl acting as an unofficial interpreter/translator for Goebbels, and van Houten struggling to look intimidated when necessary. Riefenstahl keeps cropping up, and after a while you begin to wonder if she was as involved as the movie makes her out to be.

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The effect of all these subplots and extraneous storylines is to (almost) make Owens a secondary character in his own biopic. And one unfortunate romantic dalliance aside, Owens is given the kind of never-do-wrong attributes that hype the legend instead of portraying the man behind the legend. As Owens, James is confident enough, but doesn’t seem able to go beyond the script’s insistence on making Owens as unaffectedly noble as possible, and in some respects, operating in a vacuum that leaves him unaware of the political and racial maelstrom going on around him once he’s in Germany. This leads to an awkward scene where Snyder wanders around Berlin and just happens to see a group of Jews being rounded up at the end of a back street. There are other moments where the era’s ugly racism is pushed to the forefront, but strangely, there’s more of it on display in the US than there is in Berlin.

By failing to make the inherent drama of Owens’ participation, well… dramatic, the movie never fully engages the audience, or allows it to become emotionally invested in the man’s achievements (although the focus is rightly on the Olympics, his achievement at Ann Arbor carries more resonance). Left with little to identify with beyond the casual attempts at characterisation made by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse’s banal script, the viewer has no choice but to sit back and hope that the movie remembers he or she is there at some point, but without any guarantees that this will happen.

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The cast do their best but the odds are stacked against them. Sudeikis dials down the comic charm he uses elsewhere but can do little with a role that requires him to take a back seat once Berlin rolls around, and which seems there to mainly provide Owens with motivational pep talks when he needs them. Irons is all capitalist swagger as the man who demanded superficial concessions from Nazi Germany in return for the US’s taking part in the Games, while as mentioned above, van Houten enjoys a bigger role as Riefenstahl than it’s likely she had historically. Of the rest of the cast, only Metschurat stands out as an icy, thuggish-looking Goebbels who wouldn’t look out of character if he was wearing braces and Doctor Martens boots.

Attempting to make a cohesive whole out of so many disparate strands, director Stephen Hopkins instead places a similar feel and importance on all of them, leading to a movie that moves seamlessly from one scene to the next without ever rising or falling in terms of the low-key drama, or tinkering with the tone of the movie. Hopkins has had a varied career, but while this isn’t his first biopic – he also made The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004) – this is his first “prestige” picture, and he falls back on the kind of easy choices that a first-timer might make, and in doing so, fails to charge the movie with the kind of energy that would draw in an audience and keep them glued to their seats.

Rating: 5/10 – not quite an also-ran, but near enough, Race plays liberally with the connotations of its title but is ultimately too lightweight in its execution to be a pointed, and poignant, reflection of the period it covers; Owens was an exceptional athlete, and while the movie does acknowledge this, what it doesn’t do is raise its own game to match that of its subject.

Steve Jobs (2015)

21 Thursday Jan 2016

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Steve Jobs

D: Danny Boyle / 122m

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels, Michael Stuhlbarg, Katherine Waterston, Ripley Sobo, Makenzie Moss, Perla Haney-Jardine, Sarah Snook, John Ortiz

Steve Jobs – maverick genius, arrogant manipulator, or indifferent human being? In Danny Boyle’s latest movie we get to learn that the late founder and CEO of Apple was all three, which shouldn’t be a surprise as each description isn’t exclusive of itself. But where Aaron Sorkin’s script, adapted from Walter Isaacson’s book, impresses most is when we see Jobs being all three at the same time.

The structure of the movie allows us to see Jobs at three separate points in his life, and each time in the immediate lead up to a product launch. So in 1984 we see him trying to launch the Macintosh, Apple’s first new product in seven years since the Apple II. In 1988 he’s on his own, attempting to impress everyone with the NeXT computer, an item that is doomed to failure. And we end on a high note in 1998 with the launch of the first iMac and Jobs’ ensuring he would never be forgotten. It’s like a crazy rollercoaster ride, as the advances in computer innovation are revealed to be less important than marketing and design. As Jobs so aptly puts it, “They won’t know what they’re looking at or why they like it but they’ll know they want it”.

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By telling Jobs’ story in three distinct episodes, Boyle and Sorkin, with the aid of a very talented cast, reveal how Jobs started with an idea and kept pursuing it for over fifteen years. That idea may have gone through some variations in all that time, but the movie paints a very convincing portrait of a man driven by the need to do things differently and in a way that’s at odds with everyone around him. In his pursuit of excellence in home computing, Jobs brooked very little compromise, and we see this in the meticulous nature of his product launches, where even the Exit signs have to be switched off so that the visual presentation can have the most impact. Jobs doesn’t compromise, and he doesn’t recognise the value and support of the people around him, including his old friend and co-creator of the Macintosh, Steve Wozniak (Rogen), and his long-suffering personal assistant Joanna Hoffman (Winslet).

Each launch brings its own set of issues and problems for Jobs to overcome, from the first Macintosh’s failure to say “hello”, to the NeXT computer’s lack of an operating system, to Wozniak’s public insistence that the iMac launch should include an acknowledgment of the work put in by the team who made Apple II so successful. Jobs refuses to accept that any of these will interfere with his plans for success, and he drives the people around him with a fierce determination that is both alienating and patronising. The movie keeps Jobs focused and uncompromising in his self-belief, right until the end, and as an anti-hero he fits the bill entirely.

But while the behind the scenes manoeuvrings that show how each phase of Jobs’ career were a necessary, evolutionary step (for him and his computers) all make for compelling viewing, the movie is less successful with its three act structure than it realises. Each section relies on a lot of repetition, as encounters and personal problems are examined each time, albeit from slightly different angles. Jobs’ condescending treatment of Wozniak is a case in point, as is his dismissive treatment of computer engineer Andy Hertzfeld (Stuhlbarg). And then there’s Lisa, the daughter he tried to deny having.

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Jobs’ relationship with Lisa is one of the bigger subplots in the movie, and as an attempt by Boyle and Sorkin to show the man’s more “human” side, it’s nevertheless quite clumsy and unconvincing in its execution. At the first launch, Lisa is five years old; up until she uses a Macintosh to draw a picture, Jobs is distant toward her, and to her mother, Chrisann (Waterston). But the picture changes his feelings about her, and in the other two acts we see the same sort of thing happen again, as Jobs begins to treat Lisa as a person and not a Court-confirmed inconvenience (Jobs was so arrogant that upon learning that a paternity test showed it was 94% certain he was Lisa’s father, he came up with an algorithm that counter-claimed that the 6% difference meant Chrisann could have slept with any one of twenty-eight million men and the result would have been the same). While it’s a creditable attempt to humanise Jobs, it’s these scenes that carry the least weight, and the least credibility. By the time Lisa is nineteen and on the verge of wanting nothing to do with him, all it takes is for Jobs to say he was “poorly made” and she forgives him just like that (as well as a hastily improvised bribe that promises she’ll have one of the first iPods).

More potent is the relationship Jobs has with John Sculley (Daniels), the CEO he poached from Pepsi to run Apple in the Eighties. It was Sculley who had Jobs ousted from Apple following the disastrous sales of the Macintosh, and Sorkin’s script soars whenever it focuses on the pair’s uneasy relationship. There’s a bravura scene where Jobs confronts Sculley over what he sees as the CEO’s betrayal of him, and Boyle intercuts with flashbacks that show the depth of Jobs’ own complicity, giving the audience a balanced view of what happened and why. Both Fassbender and Daniels are superb in these scenes, and the movie has a fire and an energy that it lacks elsewhere.

As expected, Boyle elicits strong performances from his cast, with Fassbender giving a superb performance as the empathy-lite Jobs, and Winslet stealing the movie out from under him as Joanna. Winslet is simply in a class of her own, adding subtlety and shading to a role that would otherwise have been quite bland. When she confronts Jobs over his treatment of Lisa before the ’98 launch, the pent-up emotions she releases are as liberating for the viewer as they are for Joanna. In support, Rogen shows fleeting glimpses of the actor he can be when he’s not channelling Seth Rogen, and Daniels is magnificent as Sculley.

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Jobs is frequently challenged as to what he can actually do, and at one point he tells Wozniak that “musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra”. With Jobs, Boyle shows himself to be a great conductor as well, but thanks to some uncomfortable narrative decisions borne out of Sorkin’s script, this isn’t as rewarding as some of his other movies, and his control over the material, while evident throughout, isn’t enough to overcome the movie’s built-in deficiencies. That said, and as with all of Boyle’s movies, it’s visually stimulating and in tandem with editor Elliot Graham, he maintains a pace and a rhythm that propel the viewer along effortlessly.

Rating: 7/10 – slickly, professionally made with Boyle firmly in charge and full of impressive performances, Jobs is nevertheless a movie that fails to do full justice to its central character; as a result Jobs the human being proves less interesting than Jobs the arrogant perfectionist, and any insights into the man that can be gleaned are at the expense of soap opera elements that, unfortunately, compromise his more acerbic nature.

Mini-Review: Get on Up (2014)

28 Saturday Mar 2015

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Get on Up

D: Tate Taylor / 139m

Cast: Chadwick Boseman, Nelsan Ellis, Dan Aykroyd, Viola Davis, Lennie James, Fred Melamed, Craig Robinson, Jill Scott, Octavia Spencer, Josh Hopkins, Brandon Smith, Tika Sumpter, Aunjanue Ellis

Get on Up recounts the life and career of James Brown (Boseman), but does so in a painfully non-linear way that sometimes makes it difficult to work out just when a scene is meant to be taking place; often it’s only Brown’s hairstyle that gives the viewer a clue. Opening with a scene set in 1988 where Brown accidentally fired a shotgun in a business property he owned and which lead to his arrest (shown much later in the movie), the script by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth skips back and forth in Brown’s life, from his abandonment by his mother (Davis) and then also his father (James), to his early start in the music business as part of the Famous Flames alongside Bobby Byrd (Ellis). With still further flashbacks and changes in direction, his rise to fame is examined, as well as the lengths he went to to maintain that fame.

What arises from all this is the notion that Brown was an intensely driven man who expected unwavering loyalty from the people around him, and whose talent hid an angry narcissism. He regularly treats people with disdain, particularly supposed best friend Byrd, and seems only to have had a “relationship of equals” with his manager, Ben Bart (Ackroyd), while preferring to be called Mr Brown rather than James by everyone else. It’s a trait that’s returned to again and again throughout the movie, and seems to be the only aspect of Brown’s character and personality that Get on Up is concerned about. And with the continual chopping and changing of the narrative, we learn little else about the man, or what motivates him; this has the effect of leaving the viewer adrift for much of the running time, as the movie veers away from exploring his personality in greater depth or detail.

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What does work, thankfully, is Boseman’s towering performance as Brown. The actor captures Brown’s sheer physicality and presence superbly, and although efforts to make him look like the singer in his later years don’t quite work, it’s still an amazing portrayal, fuelled by an energy that fizzes off the screen. On stage, recreating Brown’s movements, Boseman captures perfectly every crazy dance step and pirouette with ease. And he carries that intensity with him away from the stage or studio, giving as complete a performance as he can manage, even when the script isn’t completely supporting him. The same can be said for the likes of Davis, Ackroyd and Ellis, who all make more of their roles than you might expect.

Taylor focuses more on the musical numbers, recreating Brown’s live performances at every opportunity and using these sequences to inject some much needed zing into the movie, and to keep it from stalling. They are the best things in the movie, and the pace picks up every time one comes along. Otherwise, Taylor gives us a somewhat bland retelling of Brown’s life and one that, despite the lengthy running time, still feels rushed. The movie also has too many scenes lacking any resonance or connection to the other scenes around them (one moment of domestic abuse comes out of nowhere and feels included just for the sake of it). With this lack of focus, the movie proves only fitfully rewarding.

Rating: 6/10 – vibrant and alive when it “plays the hits!”, Get on Up falters when it tries to show Brown’s life away from the limelight; with Boseman’s astounding performance rescuing things time after time, it’s a movie that only does partial justice to the life and times of the self-proclaimed Godfather of Soul.

The Better Angels (2014)

16 Monday Mar 2015

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Better Angels, The

D: A.J. Edwards / 95m

Cast: Jason Clarke, Diane Kruger, Braydon Denney, Brit Marling, Wes Bentley, Cameron  Mitchell Williams, McKenzie Blankenship

Indiana, 1817. Eight year old Abe Lincoln (Denney) lives with his father Tom (Clarke), mother Nancy (Marling), and younger sister Sarah (Blankenship) in an area of “unbroken forest”. They are joined by Nancy’s orphaned cousin, Dennis Hanks (Williams) who becomes an older brother to Abe. Abe’s father works as a farmer and a carpenter; he’s a taciturn man who doesn’t drink alcohol, gamble or curse, but he is a harsh disciplinarian, and Abe often finds himself being punished for some misbehaviour or minor infraction.

Abe has a better relationship with his mother, who is kind-hearted and supportive of his attempts to educate himself. She is a nurturing influence, one he thrives under, and the time he spends with her helps offset the onerous chores he has to do on the farm. But Abe is left adrift when Nancy contracts milk sickness and dies. His father tries to carry on but it doesn’t last long. He leaves Abe, Sarah and Dennis to manage the farm while he goes off to find another wife. When his father returns, it is with a new bride, Sarah “Sally” Bush Johnston (Kruger), a widow from Kentucky who has three children of her own. In her own way she proves as supportive and nurturing of Abe as Nancy was, and despite some initial reservations, Abe warms to her.

As their relationship deepens and strengthens, Abe’s relationship with his father remains the same, with an added emphasis on Abe’s “toughening up”. It’s around this time that Abe’s honesty becomes more noticeable (even if it leads to his being caned by his father), and his education receives a boost from the attention of local schoolteacher Mr Crawford (Bentley). Crawford seeks Tom’s permission to provide Abe with extra tutoring; as he tells Sally, Abe won’t be a backwoodsman for very much longer. Tom agrees, and Abe is set on the path to securing his future.

Better Angels, The - scene

An idyllic looking reminiscence on the early life of Abraham Lincoln, The Better Angels is a deliberately slow-paced meditation on the influences that helped the young Lincoln grow up to be the man he became. Taking as its focus the period of his life when he lost and gained a mother, the movie is a studied, thoughtful examination of the trials and joys of growing up in a wooded wilderness.

Shot in glorious, lustrous black and white, the movie paints a compelling portrait of a time and a place where life was certainly difficult, and sometimes harsh: the family’s cows get sick and die from eating poisonous weeds, and Nancy dies as a result of drinking their infected milk. When Tom Lincoln goes off to find a wife, it seems uncaring and thoughtless to leave his children and Dennis to cope until he returns, but this was part and parcel of life in America during that period, where a normal childhood had to be grabbed whenever possible. It’s to Edwards’ credit that he’s able to show that the young Lincoln was able to be a child as well as a farm labourer, and that he was able to find beauty in his surroundings, both in his two mothers and via the ever-changing natural habitat he was a part of.

Abe’s relationships with Nancy and Sarah are the heart and soul of the movie, delicate and affectionate and heartfelt, with both Marling and Kruger providing very different, yet very intuitive performances. Marling behaves almost like a wood nymph, her love of nature and the way in which she embraces it allowing Abe’s mind to embrace it too. Kruger is equally effective, imbuing Sarah with a quiet determination that Abe will realise his full potential, and unsupportive of her new husband’s strict approach to parenting. (It could be argued that without these two women in his life at such a formative time, then Abraham Lincoln’s future would have been entirely different.) As his stern, reticent father, Clarke is a stoic figure seemingly bereft of feeling and only able to connect with his son when correcting him. Indeed, the nearest he gets to showing any tenderness is when he’s teaching Abe how to wrestle, but it’s an awkward tenderness and borders on uncomfortable – for both of them.

The young Abe is played with quiet composure and assurance by Denney (making his movie debut), and he’s a great find, matching his adult co-stars for sincerity and skill. He has a natural ability that allows the viewer to engage and understand Abe instantly. Nancy mentions at one point that Abe is asking her questions she can’t answer; looking at Denney you can believe it. He’s also effective in scenes where he and his mothers bond through learning and their mutual appreciation of nature, his expressions of curiosity and understanding perfectly shaped and naturalistic. It’s a tremendous performance, and anchors the movie superbly.

With a quartet of understated yet superb performances at its centre, The Better Angels‘ glowing black and white cinematography emphasises the poetry and the beauty of the seasons, and is exhilarating to experience. Edwards’ use of shade and light, executed with tremendous precision by DoP Matthew J. Lloyd, is hugely impressive, immersing the viewer in shots of extraordinary seductiveness. Rarely has unspoilt countryside looked so alluring or captivating, and rarely has it looked so beautiful as it does here, in black and white. With every scene captured with breathtaking attention to period detail and highlighted by some of the most exquisite framing and composition seen in recent years, the movie is a visual treat par excellence.

Rating: 9/10 – some viewers may bemoan the slow pace and emphasis on recurring shots of natural beauty, but The Better Angels presents a fully realised world that is immersive and often deeply profound; with Edwards in full control of both the script and the world he’s recreating, this is a movie that resonates long after it’s been seen.

American: The Bill Hicks Story (2009)

14 Saturday Mar 2015

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American The Bill Hicks Story

D: Matt Harlock, Paul Thomas / 102m

Bill Hicks, Dwight Slade, Mary Hicks, Steve Hicks, Lynn Hicks, Kevin Booth, James Ladmirault, David Johndrow, John Farneti, Andy Huggins, Steve Epstein

From an early age growing up in Houston, Texas, it seems that Bill Hicks knew he wanted to be a comedian. At the age of thirteen he joined forces with his friend, Dwight Slade, and they started writing comedy material together. At fifteen, they snuck out of their homes to attend an open mic evening at the Comedy Workshop – and were a hit. But then Slade had to move away, leaving Hicks to build a career for himself.

He acquitted himself well on the comedy circuit, but early signs of alcohol abuse became more prevalent – and obvious – as Hicks used drinking in his act. While this allowed his true comic persona to show through, it lead to his addiction to cocaine, and a period in which his career virtually stalled. His initial promise, and fame, waned and it wasn’t until the late Eighties that he put his addictions behind him (though he continued to chain smoke throughout the rest of his life, even incorporating into his act). In 1990, Hicks’ career took an upturn when he appeared at the Montreal Just for Laughs festival. And later in the same year he appeared for the first time in the UK, where his brand of confrontational comedy caught on with audiences in a way that had never happened with US audiences; in short, they got him.

Hicks’ reputation increased off the back of his time in the UK, but even with such a boost he was still an acquired taste in the US. In 1993, he was scheduled to appear on Late Night with David Letterman, but his entire performance was cancelled from the show because the producers felt the content – which included references to the anti-abortion movement and religion – was unsuitable (the routine was finally aired on the show in 2009, and can be seen here). By this time, however, Hicks had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which had also spread to his liver. He kept it quiet, but began joking that each performance he gave might be his last. He died in February 1994, aged just thirty-two, but he remains one of the most popular, and influential, comedians of the last twenty-five years.

American The Bill Hicks Story - scene

If you’ve never seen any of Bill Hicks’ stand up routines, or watched one of his live videos, then it’s difficult to understand just how good a comedian he was. He used his keen intelligence and acerbic wit to poke fun at US mainstream society and its relation to politics, religion, consumerism, and state controls. He was often vitriolic in his routines and unflaggingly dismissive of social apathy, refusing to accept that as one audience member once said, “We don’t come to comedy to think!” If you were in the audience at one of his gigs, you had to be ready to be challenged, and not in a softly, softly way either; Hicks was uncompromising.

In telling his story, from his early life growing up in Houston, through to his final gig in January 1994, American: The Bill Hicks Story picks out the highs and lows of Hicks’ life and career, and paints a portrait of a man who left behind an indelible body of work, and who was taken from us too soon. The movie benefits from the involvement of his family: mother Mary, sister Lynn, and brother Steve, all of whom speak candidly about Hicks and his various battles with addiction, as well as the effect these had on his career. Hicks also spoke about these issues in his routines (though he remained an advocate of LSD, psychedelic mushrooms and marijuana), and he did so candidly; it’s somehow reassuring to learn that his family are the same. With their honest, heartfelt contributions, the movie is able to acknowledge Hicks as a troubled individual, but also one who was able to deal with it all, and use it as a tool to inform and educate his audiences.

Co-directors Harlock and Thomas have done a great job in assembling the various interviews that pepper the movie and give it a great deal of balance throughout. There are dozens of clips of Hicks doing what he did best, and they’ve been chosen with obvious care – one montage of Hicks accepting or having a drink onstage shows just how bad his addiction was. There’s plenty of archival footage of Hicks growing up, and the makers have adopted a graphic animated style to the material that keeps things interesting away from Hicks’ routines, and often proves inventive. Using cut-outs and graphic overlays, the movie is visually engaging and compelling, and although some viewers may have trouble keeping up with who’s providing the voice over at any given time, it doesn’t detract from the overall effectiveness of the material.

Hicks, like Lenny Bruce before him, was unafraid to challenge the establishment, and his disillusion and anger towards the powers that be are given full expression, and allow the viewer to see the passion Hicks displayed on stage. Whether or not the movie is entirely successful in showing the man behind the comedian is open for debate, as Hicks’ private life is barely touched upon unless it involves his family (for example there’s no mention of a girlfriend, or indeed, any kind of significant other), or the friends he made on the comedy circuit in Texas. But the movie’s focus is clearly on Hicks the comedian rather than Hicks the private individual, and as such, works supremely well at providing a fitting eulogy for a man who once said, “Do I have a message? Yes, I do. Here’s my message: as scary as the world is – and it is – it is merely a ride…”

Rating: 8/10 – an enjoyable, affectionate look back over the life of one of America’s finest – if not fully appreciated – comedians, American: The Bill Hicks Story is a worthy endorsement of Hicks’ life and career; by turns funny, sad, poignant and moving, but above all funny, the movie is a celebration that is both imaginative and sincere.

Mr. Turner (2014)

21 Saturday Feb 2015

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Mr. Turner

D: Mike Leigh / 150m

Cast: Timothy Spall, Dorothy Atkinson, Marion Bailey, Paul Jesson, Karl Johnson, Ruth Sheen, Lesley Manville, Martin Savage, David Horovitch, Joshua McGuire, Kate O’Flynn, Leo Bill

Eminent painter Joseph Mallord William Turner is famous for his land- and seascapes. He lives in a big house in London with his father, William (Jesson) (who acts as his assistant), and his devoted housekeeper, Hannah (Atkinson). He has children he’s estranged from: two daughters from a relationship with Hannah’s aunt Sarah (Sheen). He rejects their attempts to procure financial support from him, even when they visit with his first grandchild. When he’s not at home, Turner travels the country (and sometimes abroad) making sketches that he can expand into paintings when he’s home.

He also visits members of the aristocracy and valued patrons. On one such visit he’s accosted by the struggling artist Benjamin Haydon (Savage), who asks him for the sum of £100 to help him avoid ruin. Haydon’s entreaties lead to Turner promising to lend him £50 instead, which Haydon accepts. When his father dies, Turner becomes depressed but the need to draw and paint is stronger than his despair. Shortly after, Turner visits Margate where he finds lodging with Mrs Booth (Bailey) and her husband (Johnson). He stays there awhile and finds himself enjoying the couple’s company. When he returns a second time he learns that Mrs Booth’s husband has passed away.

In the meantime his anarchic behaviour at the Royal Academy of Arts beguiles and amuses some of his fellow artists, and angers and upsets others, such as Constable. He appears to deface one of his own seascapes with a splotch of red, then removes himself. His associates are appalled and discomfited at this, until he returns and shapes the splotch until it resembles a buoy. At this their respect is renewed, and Turner’s notoriety is upheld, along with the acceptance of his genius. Around this time, Haydon, who has had his run-in with the Academy, visits Turner and tries to repay part of his debt. Turner, whose reputation is that of a curmudgeon, relents and waives the debt.

Returning to Margate he begins a relationship with Mrs Booth; they find a place together in Chelsea where Turner spends most of his time. But when the young Queen Victoria voices her disapproval over one of his paintings, his fame and public support begins to diminish. And following an attempt to experience what it feels like to be in the midst of a snowstorm by having himself strapped to the mast of a sailing ship, his health deteriorates as well.

Mr. Turner - scene

Biopics of famous artists usually depend on their having lived eventful, passionate lives away from the canvas, but what is a director to do when their subject lives a fairly hermetic life, and who feels compelled to sketch at every opportunity (even when they’re with a prostitute and still mourning the loss of their father)? Unfortunately, Mike Leigh never really finds an answer to the question, which leaves Mr. Turner somewhat dry and determinedly episodic.

Turner’s life did have a few memorable moments but they largely occurred when he was much younger (the movie covers the last twenty-five years of his life). His younger sister died aged four and his mother was committed to an asylum where she later died. At the age of fourteen he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Arts school, and into the Academy itself a year later (Sir Joshua Reynolds was on the panel that admitted him). Perhaps the movie should have focused on these events, showing us how the “painter of light” earned that sobriquet.

Instead we have a movie that begins with Turner at the height of his powers and fame, and which seeks to concentrate on his private life, but without convincing the viewer that there’s any connection between the two. Despite his reputation for being a social malcontent, the Turner we encounter here is more open and friendly than expected and appears to be acidulous only with people he actively dislikes – there’s a great scene where the art critic John Ruskin (McGuire) reflects disapprovingly on a style of painting he clearly has no understanding of and Turner soundly rebuffs him. But while Leigh may be attempting to separate the man from his reputation, that he proves to be a more rounded individual shouldn’t come as a surprise.

In his relationships with women things vary between interesting and banal, and with his visit to a prostitute having a much different outcome than might be typical, that his emotional life was unconventional is to miss the point. There’s an element of desperation in his exploitation of Hannah that would border on abuse if she wasn’t such a willing accomplice, while his “wooing” of Mrs Booth speaks more of two lost souls finding each other than anything more dramatic. In both relationships however, Turner remains on the outside, receiving comfort when he needs it, and giving little back in return. It’s indicative of the female role in society at the time, 1826-1851, that Turner does all this without a moment’s consideration (or remorse) for his actions, and Hannah and Mrs Booth remain grateful for being part of his life.

Outside of these relationships there’s little else that serves as a way of learning more about Turner’s life, and as a result, the movie adds scene after scene that either reinforces what we already know about him, or adds nothing more to the narrative than the opportunity to show off some more of Leigh’s fastidious period recreation. This is hugely impressive, though, and is one area in which Mr. Turner can’t be faulted. Suzie Davies’ production design coupled with Charlotte Watts’ set decoration and Jacqueline Durran’s costume design, and all lovingly shot by DoP Dick Pope (and all four of them Oscar nominated for their efforts) make the movie a visual treat that is as richly rewarding as the reproductions of Turner’s paintings. It’s heritage moviemaking of the highest order.

Mr. Turner - scene2

Despite problems with the movie’s narrative and structure, Leigh is still able to show why he’s one of the most distinctive and idiosyncratic directors working today, and why any of his future projects will still command attention and respect. Leigh’s work ethic and methods are well-known, as well as his organic approach to the material he and his cast are working on, and with Mr. Turner those methods are all in place, leading to a clutch of excellent performances and some splendid supporting turns. Spall is simply magnificent, grumbling and grunting his way through scenes with a sour face and occasional flashes of charm. It’s a deceptively simple and sympathetic portrayal, and Spall inhabits the character completely, so much so that you forget he’s acting. He’s matched by Atkinson, whose screen time is much less, but who brings an unforgettable sadness and pathos to her role as Turner’s subjugated housekeeper (and for those who might be wondering why Hannah looks so dreadful by the movie’s end, it’s because she suffered from psoriasis). As Hannah’s “competitor” Mrs Booth, Bailey expresses more in one rueful smile than some actresses manage in an entire movie, and her pleasant, amiable approach to the character serves as a telling counterpoint to the gruff demeanour of Turner himself.

A movie then that requires a great deal of perseverance but which is helped immeasurably by its cast and its presentation, Mr. Turner is likely to divide audiences into two camps: those looking for a story to follow, and those who can forgive its absence. With too many longueurs for its own good, the movie struggles to be as effective as it needs to be, but retains just enough energy to help audiences reach the end. It’s a close run thing, though, and with so little explained throughout, will definitely try some viewers’ patience.

Rating: 7/10 – fans of Leigh’s might be tempted to forgive the lack of a recognisable storyline, but without it Mr. Turner suffers accordingly; strong performances and often beautiful compositions and framing can’t prevent the movie from feeling hollow, nor the material from seeming as if it wasn’t quite as fully developed as it should have been.

The Theory of Everything (2014)

05 Thursday Feb 2015

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Theory of Everything, The

D: James Marsh / 123m

Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones, Charlie Cox, Simon McBurney, Emily Watson, David Thewlis, Maxine Peake, Harry Lloyd

Cambridge, 1963. Stephen Hawking (Redmayne) is an astrophysics student with a brilliant mind and a bright future. At a party he meets Jane Wilde (Jones), who is studying Spanish Romantic poetry. As their romance blossoms so too does Stephen’s clumsiness and lack of coordination. A bad fall leads to a diagnosis of motor neurone disease and a prognosis that gives him only two more years to live. Stephen hides himself away, even from Jane, but she refuses to give up on him. Despite reservations from both their families, the pair marry and soon have their first child.

Stephen achieves his doctorate but his illness is progressing rapidly. He becomes reliant on a wheelchair for getting about and his speech deteriorates. He and Jane have a second child, and the burden on her becomes plain, but her sense of loyalty and commitment stop her from seeking help. At her mother’s suggestion she joins a local choir. Jane and the choir master, Jonathan (Cox) become friends and he begins to help her at home, looking after the children and Stephen as well. Their relationship becomes more serious; when Stephen and Jane have a third child, Jane’s mother asks if the baby is Jonathan’s. He overhears this and while he admits he has feelings for her – and she for him – he decides to stay away for a while. Stephen, however, persuades him to continue helping his family.

An invitation for Stephen to attend a concert in Bordeaux allows Jane and Jonathan to take the children camping there as well. While at the concert, Stephen becomes unwell and is taken to hospital. There a doctor advises Jane that Stephen will need a tracheotomy and that, as a result he’ll never speak again; she tells them to go ahead. Before they return to England, she and Jonathan agree not to see each other any more. Back home, Jane hires a helper, Elaine (Peake), who works with Stephen as a personal assistant. He also receives a computer which has a built-in voice synthesizer that allows him to communicate with people. It also spurs him to write a book, A Brief History of Time. When he’s invited to America to accept an award he tells Jane that he’ll be taking Elaine with him, and not her. Their marriage effectively over, Jane and Jonathan reconnect, while Stephen’s worldwide fame increases, culminating in his meeting the Queen.

Theory of Everything, The - scene2

Anyone preparing to see The Theory of Everything and expecting to be overwhelmed by long stretches involving discussions related to quantum physics and black hole information paradoxes will be both relieved and pleasantly surprised. For this isn’t a biography of Stephen Hawking the noted physicist, but Stephen Hawking the individual. Eschewing his work in favour of his home life, the movie shows how his illness proved unable to diminish his spirit. As the disease that threatens his life leaves him more and more cut off from the world around him, Stephen’s determination and will to survive rises to the fore. It’s gladdening to see his personality and character still able to shine through, the spark of his mental state undimmed. Once he’s overcome his initial bout of self-pity and he marries Jane, there’s not one moment where he even comes close to contemplating giving in. And when his relationship with Elaine leads to the dissolution of his marriage, the emotion and the regret are all there in his eyes.

Stephen’s courage by itself would make for an uplifting, inspirational story, but what makes the movie even more effective is its detailing of the struggles undertaken – willingly it must be said – by his wife, Jane. As Stephen becomes increasingly disabled, the strain she feels grows and grows, and while her devotion to him is admirable, it’s clear that her need for a normal life is becoming more and more important to her. She snatches brief moments of happiness with Jonathan, a widower looking for someone to ease his own sense of loss; they’re kindred spirits, but Jane’s sense of propriety keeps them apart. This is the other tragedy the movie portrays so well: the emotional despair that comes with realising you have no more left to give, and that it’s only a solemn commitment to someone you once loved that keeps you from leaving.

Based on Jane Wilde Hawking’s memoir Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen, the movie is an emotional roller coaster ride, charting the rise and fall of their relationship over thirty years. It’s a movie that’s expertly crafted by Marsh and features an incisive, sharply defined script by Anthony McCarten. Together, they’ve created a movie that throws a spotlight onto one of the most poignant and touching of relationships and shows how mutual affection and reliance aren’t always enough. Using a surprising lightness of touch that complements the underlying humour displayed by Stephen throughout, Marsh directs with passion and perspicacity, getting to the heart of each scene with ease and coaxing tremendous performances from his two leads. It’s also a tremendous movie to look at, with Benoît Delhomme’s photography proving almost sumptuous at times, beautifully lit and offering compositions that are lush and redolent of the time in which they’re set.

But of course the main draw – or draws, if you prefer – are the performances by Redmayne and Jones. Redmayne is nothing short of excellent as Stephen, whether portraying the gauche young man with a bright future ahead of him, or the crippled, contorted genius his illness failed to stop him becoming. Redmayne’s performance is all the more impressive for having been shot out of sequence, challenging the actor to keep track of Stephen’s physical decline and adapt it to the production schedule. Even toward the end of the movie, when he’s unable to communicate except with his eyes, Redmayne ensures every feeling and every emotion is clearly written in his gaze. It’s a towering achievement, impressive both physically and for its humanity.

But in many ways, this is Jones’s movie, the actress proving mesmerising to watch, her performance one of such singular intensity and skill that it’s almost impossible to believe she’s acting, so completely does she inhabit Jane’s character and personality. Her scenes with Cox are a masterclass of understated longing and repressed emotion – when Jane declares she has feelings for Jonathan it’s such a heartbreaking moment and so powerfully realised that the viewer can only marvel at the depths being plumbed to realise such a moment in so compelling a fashion. But what Jones does best is to externalise each little instant where Jane’s love for Stephen is eroded just that little bit more, and just a little bit more, until she’s forced to admit that she did love him once. The audience can see that moment coming, and the inevitability of it, but when it does come, Jones makes it almost unbearable to watch.

Theory of Everything, The - scene3

There’s more than able support from the likes of Thewlis as Stephen’s college professor, McBurney as his father, and Watson as Jane’s mother, while Cox’s diffident manner as Jonathan is so appealing it’s no wonder Jane falls in love with him (they’re still together today). The Cambridge locations are well chosen and there’s a tremendously evocative score by Jóhann Jóhannsson that is like a musical equation (if such a thing exists). And if anyone’s not sure, yes that is the real Stephen Hawking’s synthesised voice used in the final half hour, relied upon as the makers couldn’t reproduce its unique sound.

Rating: 9/10 – a superb biography of two people in a marriage where nothing is assured except the slow deterioration of their love for each other, The Theory of Everything is one of the most remarkable movies of 2014; with two justly lauded performances at its forefront, it’s a movie that dispenses its main protagonist’s passion for science in bite-size pieces and keeps the focus rightly on his successes and failures as “just another” fallible human being.

Super Duper Alice Cooper (2014)

21 Wednesday Jan 2015

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D: Reginald Harkema, Scot McFadyen, Sam Dunn / 98m

Alice Cooper, Shep Gordon, Dennis Dunaway, Bob Ezrin, Sheryl Cooper, Neal Smith, Bernie Taupin, Elton John, Dee Snider, Iggy Pop, John Lydon, Ella Furnier

Charting the life of Alice Cooper from his pre-teen days growing up in Detroit to his comeback gig on October 31st 1986 – after five years of dealing with drug and alcohol addictions – Super Duper Alice Cooper is a respectful, non-critical look back over the early successes and later disasters of a career spanning nearly fifty years (although the movie doesn’t venture beyond Alice’s comeback gig).

As a child, Cooper – then known by his real name of Vincent Furnier – suffered from asthma and often needed an inhaler. On his doctor’s advice, he and his family moved to Phoenix. (The change of scenery, though, didn’t prevent a bad case of appendicitis that nearly killed him.) In high school, Cooper met Dennis Dunaway; they had a shared interest in art, and soon became best friends. When their high school put on a talent show they decided to form a band called the Earwigs and play songs by the Beatles. They enlisted Glen Buxton to play guitar and they were a surprise success (even though Cooper and Dunaway didn’t really know what they were doing).

Landing a regular gig at a local “rock ‘n’ roll teenage dance club”, the band changed its name to the Spiders, and began expanding their repertoire to include songs by the Yardbirds and others (at one point they even opened for the Yardbirds). Moving to Los Angeles in 1967 in an attempt to make it big, the band fell in with the GTO’s, über-groupies who lived in the basement of a log cabin owned by Frank Zappa. Through the GTO’s, they created a new look for themselves and changed the band’s name to Alice Cooper. They enlisted Shep Gordon as their manager and Zappa produced what was to be their first album.

Unable to make much headway in L.A., the band landed a festival gig in Detroit that saw them finally find their audience. At another festival in Toronto a now infamous incident involving a chicken saw their stock rise that much higher. But without any hit records, they were unable to capitalise on their new-found fame, until Gordon met with, and persuaded, Bob Ezrin to work with them. Soon, they had a big hit with a song called I’m Eighteen, and the band was on its way to super-stardom. A string of hit albums and ever more outrageous stage shows followed, but with it came a dissatisfaction amongst the rest of the band that led to Cooper going solo in 1975.

At the same time, Cooper’s drinking was beginning to get out of hand. As he pursued his solo career, a spell in rehab led to a brief resurgence in his career – which wasn’t proving as successful as when Alice Cooper was a band – but he soon swapped alcohol for drugs. From the late Seventies through to the early Eighties, Cooper’s deteriorating health and appearance led to a series of albums that Cooper can’t even remember recording. Finally, he went back into rehab, and in 1986 made a successful return to the music scene with a new album, Constrictor, and a concert tour that reminded everyone of what a prodigious talent he was (and continues to be).

Super Duper Alice Cooper - scene

Flirting with hagiography at times, Super Duper Alice Cooper is a biography that has the full support of Alice Cooper and pretty much everyone he wants the viewer to hear from (except, of course, Michael Bruce). While Cooper is open about his drug and alcohol addictions, it shouldn’t come as a surprise as he’s gone on the record about them on several occasions – and in more ways than one: listen to From the Inside if you need to know more. What’s left is a collection of nostalgic reminiscences about the early days of Cooper’s career when he was still more Vincent Furnier than Alice Cooper.

The inevitable transformation from tee-total pastor’s son to booze-addled rock star is shown as an unavoidable side effect of rock and roll, and while we all might buy into that on some level, the movie’s real focus is on the good times had by all; even the infamous concert in Toronto when Alice threw a live chicken into the audience is treated like it was an awesome moment, though not one that was “healthy for the chicken”. The band’s on-stage antics, some of which look very bizarre and unrelated to the music being played, appear to have been thought up (or more likely improvised) more for effect than any real “let’s-put-on-a-show-and-wow-the-audience” approach. It does make the viewer wonder how on earth the band became such a success.

But while the very early days are treated with a detailed and cheerily nostalgic air, as the band becomes famous the movie moves away from anecdotes about the group and, as happened in real life back in the early Seventies, the focus becomes Cooper himself: his fame, his solo career, and his eventual bouts of alcohol and drug dependency. The break up of the band is glossed over for the most part, and while Dunaway gets to express his disappointment at the end of his friendship with Cooper, it’s a rare moment where criticism is allowed to be heard. Otherwise, unless it comes from Cooper himself – and even he isn’t that self-critical – there’s not a dissenting voice to be heard to provide some balance.

It’s a shame as Cooper’s career has always been varied, both professionally and personally, with as many ups as downs, but throughout there has been a commitment to the music that has kept him going. The movie touches on this on occasion, but seems determined to spend more time relaying as many showbiz anecdotes or celebrity encounters as it can possibly squeeze in.

The look of the movie is very stylised with an impressive amount of archival and contemporary footage mixed together with a great deal of pizzazz, along with attention-grabbing graphics, overlays and 3D effects. Images are tweaked and adjusted and manipulated in so many different ways it becomes distracting, and the decision to employ voice overs rather than talking heads is a mistake as it makes it difficult sometimes to work out who’s saying what. And then there’s the inclusion – the very repetitive and oversold inclusion – of scenes from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), which are there to highlight the fact that off-stage, Cooper is a million miles from the twisted, macabre dilettante he plays on-stage (after the umpteenth clip you’ll want to raise your fist and yell, “Enough already! I get it!”).

Rating: 5/10 – visually engaging, and with a predictably great soundtrack, Super Duper Alice Cooper peeks under the lid of Cooper’s career but only tells the viewer half of what it sees; there’s a lot more to Cooper’s career than is revealed here, and the lack of balance leaves it feeling more like a Cooper-sanctioned vanity project than the warts ‘n’ all documentary some viewers might be expecting.

10 Movies That Are 40 Years Old This Year – 2014

22 Wednesday Oct 2014

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Pick any year and you’re likely to find ten really good films that were released during that year, but 1974 is a year when there were ten really great films released.  It’s not a year that stands out when first thought about, but upon closer inspection it seems like a banner year, when movie makers pulled out all the stops and gave us a succession of impressive movies that even now, still resonate and attract viewers in high numbers.  (And if truth be told, this list could have been stretched a little further, but 13 Movies That Are 40 Years Old This Year didn’t sound right.)  So, in no particular order, here are those ten movies we’re all still talking about.

1) Chinatown – Roman Polanski’s stunning neo-noir thriller transformed Jack Nicholson into a superstar and made Robert Towne’s elaborate, gripping screenplay – one of the most compelling, intelligent screenplays ever written – the main reason for seeing the movie.  With superb performances from Faye Dunaway and John Huston, this incredible movie still has the power to unnerve and startle with its story of corruption and greed in 40’s Los Angeles, and that tragic revelation.

Chinatown - scene

2) Lenny – Revisiting the life of counter-culture, angst-ridden comic Lenny Bruce was always going to depend on the actor playing him, but Dustin Hoffman turns in an amazing, detailed performance that is possibly his best ever.  With a career best turn from Valerie Perrine, deft, sympathetic direction from Bob Fosse, and a grimy, authentic recreation of the clubs where Bruce vented his anger at the hypocrisies of society, Lenny still has the potential to shock and surprise, and takes no prisoners (just like Bruce himself).

3) Fear Eats the Soul – German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder had made a number of excursions into movies for TV before he wrote and directed this vital, important tale of the relationship between a Moroccan migrant worker (the soulful El Hadi ben Salem) and a German woman in her mid-sixties (the affecting Brigitte Mira). Ageism and racism are given short shrift by Fassbinder’s script, and the growing relationship is portrayed naturally and with little sentiment.  It’s a dour movie, to be sure, but uplifting at the same time.

4) The Godfather Part II – The crowning glory of Francis Ford Coppola’s career and a movie that’s nigh on faultless, The Godfather Part II is the classic example of a sequel that is better than its predecessor… so, so much better.  Even Brando’s presence isn’t missed.  With its flashback sequences detailing the origin of Vito Corleone’s role as Godfather conflated with the inexorable rise of his son Michael to the same position, this has tragedy and triumph in equal measure, and features astonishing achievements in directing, scripting, acting, cinematography, sound, editing, costumes, art direction, and set design.  In short, it’s a masterpiece.

Godfather Part II, The - scene

5) The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – With its fierce, tension-wringing set up and feral, nightmarish family of cannibals, Tobe Hooper’s second feature still has the power to shock, and leave audiences feeling drained by the end.  The iconic image of Gunnar Hansen with a literal “face”-mask and revving a chainsaw – once seen, never forgotten – sums up the movie’s terrifying approach to its subject matter, and confirms (if anyone needed reminding) that low budget horror can be startling, original and a once in a lifetime experience.

6) A Woman Under the Influence – Possibly the finest examination of mental illness within the family, John Cassavetes’ stinging, heart-rending drama features a tour-de-force performance from Gena Rowlands as the emotionally downtrodden Mabel, a woman whose ill treatment by her husband and children leads her to suppress any positive feelings for fear of being judged as “unbalanced”.  Not a movie for everyone but one that isn’t afraid to confront a complex, contentious issue with poise and a piercing intelligence.

7) The Phantom of Liberty – If you like your movies chock-full of symbolism, surrealism and absurdist humour, then Luis Buñuel’s collection of barely connected episodes will capture your attention and never let go.  It’s a modern masterpiece of (mis)direction and subversive behaviour, and features a seasoned cast that includes Jean Rochefort, Monica Vitti and Adolfo Celi, all of whom enter into the spirit of things with undisguised gusto.

Phantom of Liberty, The - scene

8) The Conversation – It’s that man Coppola again, this time with an introspective low-key look at the self-contained life of a surveillance expert (the superb Gene Hackman) who finds himself drawn – against his better judgment – into a perfectly weighted mystery.  The chilly, withdrawn mise-en-scene is expertly crafted, and Coppola’s script delivers more and more as the movie heads toward its incredible denouement.  To release both this and The Godfather Part II in the same year – well, that’s just insane.

9) Young Frankenstein – Mel Brooks’ finest hour, even though Blazing Saddles was also released in ’74, this grand homage to the Universal horrors of the 30’s and 40’s is an undeniable treat, full of terrific one-liners – “To the lumber yard!” – and wonderful visual flourishes.  Co-writers Brooks and Gene Wilder are on top form, and their affection for the Fronkensteen movies made by Universal adds to the joy of watching Mary Shelley’s classic tale unfold in its own, very unique manner.  And the “Puttin’ on the Ritz” sequence is just inspired.

10) The Taking of Pelham One Two Three – Ignore the turgid remake with Denzel Washington and John Travolta, this is ten times as good and ten times as gripping.  Walter Matthau is the grizzled cop engaged in a battle of wits with train hijacker Robert Shaw, and as the movie ratchets up the tension, audiences are treated to one of the finest thrillers ever made.  Bravura movie making from all concerned but anchored by a fantastic job of direction by the underrated Joseph Sargent.

Taking of Pelham One Two Three, The - scene

If you agree or disagree with my choices, feel free to let me know.  And if there’s another year with an equally brilliant selection of movies released, feel free to let me know as well.  But more importantly, if you haven’t seen some or all of the movies listed above, then what are you doing reading this?  Get out there and watch them!

Jobs (2013)

19 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by in Movies

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Jobs

D: Joshua Michael Stern / 128m

Cast: Ashton Kutcher, Dermot Mulroney, Josh Gad, Lukas Haas, Matthew Modine, J.K. Simmons, Lesley Ann Warren, Ron Eldard, Ahna O’Reilly, Victor Rasuk, John Getz, Kevin Dunn, Robert Pine, James Woods

Opening with the unveiling of the iPod in 2001, Jobs looks back at the founding of Apple, and the emergence of the Mac, while also providing a biography of Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs (Kutcher).  The movie covers the years 1974 to 1996, and while there is at least one other movie that paints a better picture of those times – Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999) – this tries hard to provide a fair representation of both the events that occurred and the people involved with them.  That said, the focus here is squarely on Steve Jobs.

From the earliest moments at Reed College where Jobs has dropped out, the movie paints him as a maverick, well-liked, able to maintain relationships, but still an outsider.  Two of these aspects would fade as time passed, but in these early days it’s easy to root for Jobs because he has an almost goofy enthusiasm for what he’s doing. When he sees what his friend Steve Wozniak (Gad) is working on, and realises the potential for the home computer market (which didn’t exist back in 1976), he persuades Wozniak to go into business with him, and Apple Computer Ltd is born.

Getting Apple off the ground isn’t easy, but Jobs pushes and pushes until the company is launched on the stock market.  But there’s no overnight success story.  The Apple II consumes so much research and development money that Apple is on the verge of being financially crippled; the shareholders start to question Jobs’ methods, and the board of directors, led by Arthur Rock (Simmons), relieve Jobs of his position as head of the company.

Asked by board member (and original investor) Mike Markkula (Mulroney) to work on another project that Apple had initially passed on, Jobs takes over the development of the Macintosh.  The same motivations and working methods cause similar problems but the Macintosh is a revolutionary step forward for home computing.  When the board is presented with the Mac they see its potential but have no idea how to market it.  Jobs insists they hire John Sculley (Modine) away from Pepsi (he came up with the Pepsi Taste Test Challenge).  With Sculley on board, everything looks set for the success everyone has waited for.  But there’s a problem (isn’t there always?): the cost of making the Mac is prohibitive in terms of selling it to the public.  This time, the board votes to remove Jobs from Apple altogether, and install Sculley as its CEO.  Let down by everyone around him, Jobs turns his back on Apple and works on another project that he launches himself, NeXT.  While this affords him modest success, the same can’t be said for Apple.  The company flounders without him, the shares take a nosedive, and they spend too much time and money competing with Microsoft.  With things spiralling out of control, the new board, led by Ed Woolard (Pine), bring Jobs back in as – at first – a consultant, and then as the new CEO.  Back in charge of his own company, Jobs takes Apple forward on the journey that so many of us are grateful for.

Jobs - scene

As a one-stop shop for the early history of Apple, Jobs is consistently lightweight, both in its depictions of those early days, and the impact those days have on us now, and it’s the movie’s split personality that gets in the way.  It wants to be a chronicle of those pioneering days when home computers were a dream that only a few could imagine.  It also wants to be a biopic of Steve Jobs.  And even though the movie runs over two hours, it always feels that there’s a lot of incidents and events that have been left out.

The movie also struggles to explain a lot of what was happening and why on a personal level.  The relationship between Jobs and Wozniak is a case in point.  Wozniak is the man largely responsible for the first Apple computer; his initial work paved the way for all the Apple computer products we use today.  He and Jobs, at first, are great pals.  But as the business grows and Jobs becomes more and more obsessed with making Apple a pioneer in home computing, their relationship withers until Wozniak decides he has to leave.  Gad gets a compelling but ultimately “Hollywood” speech to make as Wozniak, explaining why he thinks things have gone wrong between them.  It’s a rare moment in a movie that provides plenty of strong emotional moments – Jobs’ rant at Bill Gates over the phone is a highlight – but they’re not grounded in any kind of recognisable, explainable way.  Jobs shouts at his co-workers to goad them on; Jobs refuses to believe his girlfriend’s child is his; Markkula says he’s on Jobs’ side the night before he votes with the board to force Jobs out; all these events or moments and more remain unexplained or unexplored.

The problem lies with the script by Matt Whiteley.  It skims over a lot of events without attaching any depth to them, or overdoes the “significance” factor (Jobs throwing away a Walkman).  The dialogue is often simplistic in relation to the people involved, but seems more sure-footed when dealing with the technical side of things.  It also provides a few unintentional moments of humour, and in its efforts to cover such a long period of time, misses things out altogether (for example, Jobs’ marriage to Laurene Powell – she and their first child, Reed, appear out of the blue).  Stern fails to address these issues, and while most scenes hold the attention, they often lack for any cohesion or cumulative effect – sometimes it’s like watching a series of vignettes.

Kutcher has a superficial resemblance to the younger Jobs, and this may be why he was cast.  However, Kutcher is not an actor with a broad range, and there are several instances where he fails to convince, mostly when Jobs is being cruel: the conviction is there but Kutcher makes Jobs sound petulant as well, an aspect of his character that seems out of place.  Mulroney and Simmons do well, as does Gad, although each actor has a minimal amount of support from the script and their director.  The production design by Freddy Waff is solid if unspectacular, while Russell Carpenter’s cinematography gives the movie a welcome boost.  For a movie made in the past year, it certainly looks like one made in the 70’s and 80’s, and that contemporary feel is one of the few positive aspects Jobs gets right.

Rating: 5/10 – a scattershot approach to the early days of Apple leaves Jobs as unrewarding as buying a Betamax video player must have been; watch only as a jumping off point, or to dip your toes in the water.