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thedullwoodexperiment

~ Viewing movies in a different light

thedullwoodexperiment

Tag Archives: Julianne Moore

Short Cuts (1993)

03 Wednesday Apr 2019

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Andie MacDowell, Comedy, Drama, Favourite movie, Julianne Moore, Literary adaptation, Matthew Modine, Raymond Carver, Relationships, Review, Robert Altman

D: Robert Altman / 188m

Cast: Andie MacDowell, Bruce Davison, Jack Lemmon, Julianne Moore, Matthew Modine, Anne Archer, Fred Ward, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Chris Penn, Lili Taylor, Robert Downey Jr, Madeleine Stowe, Tim Robbins, Lily Tomlin, Tom Waits, Frances McDormand, Peter Gallagher, Annie Ross, Lori Singer, Lyle Lovett, Buck Henry, Huey Lewis, Michael Beach, Charles Rocket

When the pre-teen son of television commentator Howard Finnigan (Davison) and his wife Anne (MacDowell) is knocked down by a car driven by waitress Doreen Pigott (Tomlin), he refuses to let her drive him home afterwards. Later, he falls unconscious and is taken to hospital. It’s the day before his eighth birthday. Doreen is harassed at the diner where she works by Stuart (Ward), an out-of-work salesman, and his buddies Gordon (Henry) and Vern (Lewis) before they head off on a fishing trip. Gene Shepard (Robbins), a cop whose wife, Sherri (Stowe), doesn’t know he’s having an affair, abandons the family dog because of its excessive barking. Ralph Wyman (Modine), a doctor, and his wife, Marian (Moore), are a couple in crisis who stay together out of convenience instead of love, while the Finnigans’ next door neighbours have a pool cleaner, Jerry Kaiser (Penn), whose wife, Lois (Leigh), works as a phone sex operator…

These are just some of the stories that intertwine and intermingle with each other in Robert Altman’s majestic adaptation of nine short stories and one poem written by Raymond Carver. Possibly the finest ensemble piece ever made, Short Cuts examines the lives of twenty-two separate characters, and does so with a precision and an understanding of the underlying desperation that each of them is feeling; it’s like watching a group therapy session where everyone is jockeying for the most attention. Altman achieves the impossible here: he makes every one of those twenty-two characters appear credible and relatable, and he does so by stripping away the masks they hide behind in order to reveal the fallible, scrabbling egos that fuel their shallow pretensions and selfish conceits. It’s holding up a mirror to society time, an indelible foray into the casual brutality of everyday lives, with verbal, physical, and emotional attacks being meted out, seemingly at every opportunity, in order for these characters to feel superior to the people closest to them: the people they purport to love. At times it’s terrifying to see the depths of despair that some characters are experiencing, while others go about their lives blithely and with an equally terrifying lack of self-awareness. How do these people survive from day to day?

The answer is: any way they can, and Altman, along with co-screenwriter Frank Barhydt, artfully highlights the ways that they achieve this, whether it’s through forbearance, a reliance on alcohol, or by simply ignoring what’s happening around them. All this – and at over three hours – could seem like spending time with a group of people you’d happily cross the street to avoid, but the movie has such a bone dry, and darkly scabrous sense of humour that you can’t help but find amusement in even the most horrendous moments (and sometimes to laugh is just about the best and only option the viewer has). With Los Angeles providing the perfect backdrop for all this psychic turmoil, and pitch perfect performances from all concerned, the movie is evenly structured among the characters for maximum effect, and Geraldine Peroni’s editing ensures the action occurs with fluidity and a pace to match. Aside from The Player (1992), Altman has never been this good, his direction proving incisive and perceptive in equal measure, and his mastery of the various storylines is an object lesson in how to make each disparate element of a movie as important as all the rest. It’s an impressive achievement, one that rewards the audience at every turn, and better still, with each repeat viewing.

Rating: 9/10 – a bold, multi-layered odyssey through the hellish environs of middle-class America, Short Cuts is abrasive, awash with attitude, fiendishly funny, and starkly revealing of the deceptions that ordinary people employ to give their lives meaning; a one-of-a-kind movie that goes to some very dark places indeed, it still has a degree of hope running throughout the various storylines – even if it is chafed and frayed to snapping point.

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Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)

20 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Action, Comedy, Drama, Drugs, Galahad, Halle Berry, Julianne Moore, Kingsman, Mark Strong, Matthew Vaughn, Merlin, Pedro Pascal, Poppyland, Review, Sequel, Statesman, Taron Egerton

D: Matthew Vaughn / 141m

Cast: Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Taron Egerton, Mark Strong, Halle Berry, Pedro Pascal, Edward Holcroft, Hanna Alström, Bruce Greenwood, Emily Watson, Elton John, Channing Tatum, Jeff Bridges, Poppy Delevingne, Sophie Cookson, Michael Gambon

When Kingsman: The Secret Service hit our screens back in 2014, its anarchic sense of fun and willingness to push the boundaries of good taste (exploding heads, anyone?) made it stand out from the crowd, and introduced us to Colin Firth the action hero. It was smart, it was savvy, it was funny, and its action sequences, especially that astounding sequence set in a Kentucky church, showed that well choreographed fight scenes could still impress and leave jaws dropped everywhere. A sequel may have been in some initial doubt – writer/director Vaughn wasn’t sure the first movie would be successful enough to warrant a second outing – but now it’s here, and it’s a very mixed bag indeed.

As a sequel, Kingsman: The Golden Circle adheres to the formula for a follow-up to an unexpectedly successful movie in that it goes bigger, brings back its original stars and gives them less to do, references its predecessor in some ways that are good and some ways that aren’t, introduces a group of new characters that the audience aren’t allowed to connect with, and extends the running time unnecessarily. It’s as if Vaughn and returning co-screenwriter Jane Goldman have heard the phrase, “Give ’em what they want, and then give ’em more” and taken it to heart. But there are too many elements that clash with each other, and the movie never maintains a consistent tone. Also, that anarchic sense of fun that the first movie carried off so well, here feels awkward and somewhat laboured, and we have yet another villain with a goofy personality who’s just plain misunderstood (Moore’s over-achieving cartel boss wants to be recognised for her “business acumen”).

Of course, any sequel that seeks to revive a character who appeared to be killed in the first movie, has to tread carefully in how it brings them back; this may be a world far removed from our own reality, but even in fantasy land, death means dead and gone. Vaughn and Goldman have come up with an ingenious idea that makes sense within the confines of the world that Kingsman operates within, but the fact that in terms of the plot a year has passed and Harry (Firth) is still suffering from amnesia and the Kingsmen haven’t been told he’s alive, is just one of the larger plot holes that pepper the script and make you think that while Vaughn has been reported as saying that “writing this was the hardest thing I’ve ever done”, it soon becomes obvious that he needed to try a bit harder. Perhaps the biggest question that goes unanswered, is why villain of the piece Poppy Adams (Moore) takes out the Kingsmen in the first place. Without even a throwaway line to clear up the matter, viewers could be forgiven for thinking that it was important to the plot, and it is, but only as a way of introducing their American cousins, the Statesmen.

Cue a lot of cool new gadgets, the presence of franchise newbies Tatum, Berry, Pascal, and Bridges (seemingly the only people who work for Statesman – until the end, that is), a side trip to the Glastonbury Music Festival that actually includes a scene where Eggsy (Egerton) asks his girlfriend, Tilde (Alström), if she’s okay with him having sex with another woman (Delevingne), the sorry spectacle of Elton John having been persuaded to send up his image from the Seventies and encased in ever more ridiculous stage outfits (he’s been kidnapped by Poppy – of course), a physics defying stunt involving a cable car that at least has the benefit of a terrific one-liner as its pay-off, Harry being cured of his retrograde amnesia but still seeing butterflies (don’t ask), Poppy’s robot attack dogs Bennie and Jet (geddit?), and several plot threads that are left dangling like so much silly string.

There’s more, a lot more, but if there’s one area where the movie lets itself, and the audience, down, it’s with a disastrous sub-plot involving the US President (Greenwood) and his so-called “war on drugs”. Poppy’s plan is to infect the millions of addicts who use her drugs with a deadly chemical that will kill them. Unless the President agrees to her demand to make all drugs legal, then she’ll withhold the antidote. Publicly, the President appears to agree to her terms, but privately he has no intention of saving anyone, reasoning that if all the drug addicts in the world are dead, then illegal drugs will become a thing of the past because there’ll be no one around to take them. There is a twisted sense of logic there – barely – and it could have been made to sound semi-plausible, but the President’s flippant, couldn’t-care-less attitude seems more of a rebuke to the current real-life incumbent than any properly considered character design. And leading on from the President’s decision, the movie opts to provide audiences with the unsettling and seriously off-kilter sight of thousands of victims of Poppy’s plan being herded into cages and stacked on top of each other within the confines of a US football stadium (is there a message here?).

This time around the comedy is muted in favour of a more serious approach, but it’s as haphazardly sewn into the fabric of the movie as everything else. The action sequences, particularly an opening display of vehicular mayhem on the streets of London, and the final showdown at Poppyland, have been shot and edited with a view to making the fight choreography flow as quickly as possible within the frame, but as a result, details are lost and much of what can be seen seems to involve as much posing as it does fighting. Against all this, the performances are adequate, though Strong and Berry are on better form than the rest, while there are odd instances – a bar fight that echoes the original’s pub brawl, but with Harry coming off worst; Merlin singing Take Me Home, Country Roads by John Denver at a crucial moment – where the viewer can see glimpses of what might have been, but overall there aren’t enough to warrant a better appreciation of a movie that’s slackly directed, confuses sentiment for depth in its treatment of the relationship between Harry and Eggsy, and which doesn’t try hard enough to match the style and energy of its predecessor.

Rating: 5/10 – with the prospect of a third movie just over the horizon, Kingsman: The Golden Circle is the point where the service should hang up its tailoring shingle and head off into early retirement; a disappointing sequel that shows a flare for inconsistency throughout, it offers shallow pleasures for those who want that sort of thing, but will prove a more difficult experience for those expecting a repeat of the giddy heights of the first movie.

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Mini-Review: Freeheld (2015)

22 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Cancer, Civil partnerships, Drama, Ellen Page, Equality, Freeholders, Julianne Moore, Laurel Hester, Michael Shannon, New Jersey, Ocean County, Pension rights, Peter Sollett, Police, Review, True story

Freeheld

D: Peter Sollett / 103m

Cast: Julianne Moore, Ellen Page, Michael Shannon, Josh Charles, Steve Carell, Dennis Boutsikaris, William Sadler, Tom McGowan, Kevin O’Rourke, Luke Grimes, Gabriel Luna, Anthony DeSando, Skipp Sudduth, Mary Birdsong, Kelly Deadmon

When Forrest Gump memorably announced that “life [is] like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get”, he probably wasn’t referring to Freeheld, a cliché-ridden recounting of the struggle endured by New Jersey police detective Laurel Hester (Moore) as she tried to get her pension benefits assigned to her same-sex partner, Stacie Andree (Page). Hester had an aggressive form of lung cancer that spread to her brain, and she wanted her pension paid to Stacie so that she would be able to remain in their home.

Freeheld - scene1

But a combination of political and gender prejudices decreed that Stacie would not be entitled to those benefits, even though the Ocean County board of freeholders assigned to make that decision had been recently empowered to do so by the state legislature. Instead they rejected Laurel’s claim and, if you believe this version of events, remained stubborn in their rejection of her claim for some time afterward, and in the face of mounting protests and media criticism.

Now, if you’ve read this far – or have already seen the movie – it won’t be much of a stretch to realise that Laurel got her wish and Stacie got her benefits. But it’s the way in which this story is told that is likely to anger viewers, more than the intransigence of the board. With its bland, TV-movie-of-the-week visual style, and numbingly rote storytelling, Freeheld has all the appeal of televised jury service (and where the case is a minor one). It ticks all the boxes as it wends its weary way to its foregone conclusion: Hester’s concealment of her lesbianism from her colleagues and police partner Dane Wells (Shannon); the way in which this concealment affects her relationship with Stacie; Wells’ disappointment when he finds out (that Laurel didn’t tell him ages ago); the discovery of a lump that “isn’t that serious”; the male police detective (played by Grimes) who’s also gay and can’t/won’t show his support; Stacie’s determination to believe that Laurel will beat her cancer; one of the board (Charles) acting as its moral conscience; and the discovery of information about the board that will help in getting them to overturn their decision.

Freeheld - scene3

Freeheld is a movie that lacks joy and passion, and thanks to uninspired direction from Sollett, it’s even hard to be outraged by the board’s spurious reasons for their decision. Even Moore isn’t as engaged in her character as you’d expect her to be (perhaps she realised early on there wasn’t a lot of depth there), and Page plays Stacie as either grouchy or permanently upset with no room in between. Shannon looks uncomfortable throughout, Charles looks like he’s trying to solve a difficult maths problem, Grimes wears a guilty-through-shame expression that should be a giveaway to his colleagues but isn’t, and there’s an irritating, over-the-top performance by Carell as a gay rights activist that both enlivens the movie and highlights how drab it is elsewhere.

Rating: 4/10 – despite the movie’s attempts to retell an important milestone in the struggle for equal rights, Freeheld is a lazy attempt to do so, and fails to convince in almost every department; for a better overview of Laurel Hester’s story, track down Freeheld (2007), an Oscar-winning documentary short that doesn’t deal in awkward sentimentality or by-the-numbers moralising.

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Happy Birthday – Julianne Moore

03 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

3 December, Actress, Assassins, Birthday, Evolution, Julianne Moore, Shelter, Surviving Picasso, The English Teacher

Julianne Moore (3 December 1960 -)

Julianne Moore

The Oscar-winning actress has the kind of career that few can ever dream of, but she’s known mostly for her dramatic roles in movies such as Savage Grace (2007), Short Cuts (1993), Boogie Nights (1997) and Still Alice (2014). But ever since her first big screen appearance in Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990), she’s flitted from genre to genre and made lasting, indelible impressions in all of them – even in something like Next (2007). Here are five movies you may have forgotten she was in, and which serve as evidence that she can do a wide range of movies and genres and not just drama.

Assassins (1995) – Character: Electra

Assassins

As the target for both Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas’ titular assassins, Moore plays a nervy computer hacker who (somewhat inevitably) earns Stallone’s trust and protection. In real terms it’s a supporting role, but Moore’s presence is welcome amidst all the testosterone flying around, and she invests the character with a will to survive that plays well against Stallone’s taciturn hitman.

Evolution (2001) – Character: Dr Allison Reed

Evolution

Moore does comedy in this sci-fi extravaganza, as the clumsiest CDC scientist you’re ever likely to see, and matching old hands David Duchovny and Orlando Jones for laughs. It’s nice to see her doing something lightweight and angst-free, and she seems to be enjoying herself at the same time, displaying a flair for comedy that hasn’t been exploited nearly enough over the years.

Shelter (2010) – Character: Cara Harding

Shelter

This horror mystery gave Moore a chance to do scary as the forensic psychiatrist who learns that the multiple personalities displayed by one of her patients (played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers) are all murder victims. It’s not the best movie in her resumé, but Moore is as compelling as always and makes her character’s crusade for the truth more understandable and credible than in most movies of this type.

Surviving Picasso (1996) – Character: Dora Maar

SURVIVING PICASSO, Anthony Hopkins, Julianne Moore, 1996

In this biopic of the famous artist (played by Anthony Hopkins), Moore gets to appear in a Merchant-Ivory production, and play one of Picasso’s muses, the photographer Dora Maar. Moore is excellent as one of the many women Picasso mistreated during his life, and while this is definitely a dramatic role, here Moore rises to the challenge of playing a real person, and steals the movie.

The English Teacher (2013) – Character: Linda Sinclair

The English Teacher

As the character of the title, Moore mixes comedy and drama to disarming effect as a teacher who discovers she’s obsessed by a former student (played by Michael Angarano) who returns to their respective hometown after writing an unsuccessful play in New York. Linda’s determination to put on his play leads her to take risk after risk where she’s never done so before, and Moore makes her obsessive/compulsive behaviour both sweet and disturbing at the same time.

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The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 (2015)

20 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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District 13, Donald Sutherland, Drama, Francis Lawrence, Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Julianne Moore, Katniss Everdeen, Liam Hemsworth, Literary adaptation, Panem, Philip Seymour Hoffman, President Snow, Review, Sci-fi, Sequel, Suzanne Collins, The Capitol, Thriller, Woody Harrelson

Mockingjay Part 2

D: Francis Lawrence / 137m

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Donald Sutherland, Julianne Moore, Woody Harrelson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Willow Shields, Sam Claflin, Elizabeth Banks, Mahershala Ali, Jena Malone, Jeffrey Wright, Natalie Dormer, Evan Ross, Elden Henson, Wes Chatham, Michelle Forbes, Patina Miller, Stanley Tucci

Picking up after Peeta’s failed attempt to kill Katniss, the final instalment in The Hunger Games series begins with a problem for both the makers and the audience to consider: should the movie launch straight into the rebels’ expected attack on the Capitol, or should it hold back and spend some time reiterating the relationships between Katniss and Peeta and Gale, and begin to explore the similar machinations of President Snow and his potential successor, Alma Coin? The answer is the latter, and while this decision allows for further layers to be added to Katniss’s ever-present self-doubt (and sets up the ending), it also has the effect of reminding the viewer that we’ve been here before – and in each of the three previous movies.

One of the series’ strengths has always been the way in which Katniss appears to be a stranger to herself while everyone around her finds her actions entirely predictable. It’s an idea that continues here, with the Mockingjay being used at every turn, even when she acts independently. But it’s in danger of becoming as unwieldy a plot device as the idea that President Snow has a camera in every home in Panem (as well as in every shop, and on every street corner… you get the idea). We get it. And if the decision to split Mockingjay the novel into two parts was so that the final movie could be all about the rebels’ final push on the Capitol, then why are we still going over old ground?

Mockingjay Part 2 - scene1

To be fair, it’s the price the movie makes for being faithful to Suzanne Collins’ source material. But what it also does is to make The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 longer than it needed to be, and curiously sapped of urgency once Katniss et al begin their progress toward the Capitol. There are too many scenes where characters stop to muse on their individual plights, and Peeta tries to sort out if his memories are real or lies constructed by his torturers in the Capitol. At first glance it’s all meaningful, and yet another indication of how careful the makers have been in grounding the action, but do you know what? It’s Part Four – we already care about these characters. All we want now is for Katniss to come face to face with President Snow, and for the promise of all those booby traps we’ve seen in the trailer to give us a thrilling, rousing, edge-of-the-seat kick-ass end to everything.

What we’re looking for is the kind of series’ ending we got with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (2011), but the action sequences, though expertly staged and choreographed – and which winnow out the surplus characters – just… don’t… bring it. It’s a strange awareness to have, to realise that the best action scenes have all appeared in the earlier movies, but there it is: even the underground fight against the Capitol Mutts suffers from over-familiarity as Katniss shows off the same bow skills we’ve seen before from Legolas and Hawkeye. And as mentioned before, there’s a distinct lack of urgency to it all, as the movie’s rhythm is maintained at such a steady pace that even when Katniss and her comrades are out-running a booby-trap at full pelt, you can sense the editing team of Alan Edward Bell and Mark Yoshikawa making sure it’s not shown at too full a pelt or their hard work elsewhere might be jeopardised.

Mockingjay Part 2 - scene2

And yet, somehow – somehow – the movie overcomes these drawbacks and proves to be a fitting end to the saga. It’s still an intelligent, and intelligently made, movie, and the effort in maintaining the good work achieved in the previous movies is clear to see, with returning director Lawrence once again steering things to tremendous effect. He’s aided by a returning cast who all clearly want to be there, and who are committed to ending the series as best they can. And for the most part, they succeed. Lawrence doesn’t put a foot wrong as Katniss, miring her in doubt and misplaced guilt, and keeping her insecurities to the fore in a performance that becomes all the more impressive for having been sustained across four movies. Hutcherson impresses the most (four words I didn’t think I’d ever write), his PTSD Peeta being a difficult role to pull off, but he makes short work of it, and in doing so, makes Peeta the most sympathetic character in the whole series.

Completing the “romantic threesome” is Hemsworth as Gale. Four movies in and he’s still the series’ one weak link, an actor so stiff he could throw himself at the enemy instead of shooting them, and still score a death. (Now if Sam Claflin had played Gale, then the often tepid romance with Katniss might have been more compelling.) Sutherland continues to play Snow with effortless malice; without his silky venom to play against, the rebellion would have appeared less than necessary. As his rival for power, Moore strikes a more strident note as Coin, and as Coin’s true nature becomes more and more clear, the actress withstands the temptation to become the series’ answer to Cruella de Ville (the clue’s in the hair).

Mockingjay Part 2 - scene3

Further down the cast list, Harrelson is sidelined early on; the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman has a few scenes that hint at a bigger, if obviously curtailed role; Claflin brings his trademark smirk to playing Finnick Odair, as well as a much needed sense of fun; Banks hangs around on the periphery of things as Effie; and Tucci is shoehorned in as Caesar Flickerman in a TV segment that goes against an earlier scene where Snow (very severely) chastises an underling. Everyone is present and correct, and director Lawrence coaxes good performances from everyone, making it incredibly easy for the audience to continue rooting for their favourite characters.

Whatever your feelings about The Hunger Games franchise – and there are plenty of nay-sayers out there – this has been one of the most surprisingly intelligent and well produced projects of the last ten years. Jennifer Lawrence has proved to be an inspired choice as Katniss Everdeen, and the world of the Districts has been so convincingly constructed that the plight of their inhabitants has been echoed by events taking place in the real world even now. And even though Suzanne Collins originally wrote her novels for the YA market, these are remarkably adult movies, with a strong sense of moral culpability and responsibility. A triumph then, and when all is said and done, one that few of us could have seen coming.

Rating: 8/10 – narrative hiccoughs aside, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 is still head and shoulders above any other dystopian YA sci-fi series out there, and is a great showcase for what can be achieved if the intention is not to soft pedal any serious themes inherent in the material; thrilling (just) and chock-full of great performances, this is a fitting swansong to a series that has surprised and entertained audiences for four years and this despite getting increasingly bleaker as it’s gone along.

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Ten Stars and the Movies You Might Not Realise They Were In

10 Sunday May 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Actors, Actresses, Amy Adams, Cameos, Cameron Diaz, Colin Firth, Early movies, Ian McKellen, Jason Statham, Jeremy Renner, Julianne Moore, Leonardo DiCaprio, Movie stars, Natalie Portman, Nicolas Cage, Performances, Robert Downey Jr, Stars

Sometimes, watching old movies can provide the occasional surprise, like seeing an actor or actress in an early role – or movie – when you least expect it. This happened to me recently when I saw National Lampoon’s Senior Trip (1995) (I’m a National Lampoon movie completist – what can I say?). Imagine my surprise when I saw Jeremy Renner’s name come up in the title credits. Imagine my further surprise when it turned out he gave one of the best performances in the movie (though not that much of a surprise if you’ve seen it).

It got me thinking about other stars and their early appearances, and what other movies are out there with fledgling – or fleeting – performances from today’s big name actors and actresses. So, a few quick searches on imdb.com later, and voilà!, this post was born. I hope you have some fun with it, and if there are any other examples that you think should have been included, or are worth mentioning, feel free to let me know.

Leonardo DiCaprio – Poison Ivy (1992)

While it’s well-known that DiCaprio’s first movie role was in Critters 3 (1991), what’s perhaps less well-known is his participation in Katt Shea Ruben’s perverse shadow play of teenage sexuality run amok. But before anyone gets too excited, his role in the movie (as ‘Guy”) amounts to a walk-on part where he comes out of a school building and crosses in front of the camera. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it part, and perhaps best regarded as an example of how good DiCaprio’s agent was back then: out of nothing he got ninth billing.

Robert Downey Jr – Weird Science (1985)

Way back before he became Marvel’s go-to guy for the grounding of their Cinematic Universe, Downey Jr made an appearance in this fondly remembered ode to teenage hormones and the fetishisation of Kelly LeBrock. Cast as “Ian”, Downey Jr plays a bit of a douchebag who acts as a bully to the two main characters. It’s not a particularly memorable role, and there’s nothing to suppose that his career would take off in the way it has – twice – but it’s in keeping with John Hughes’ studied look at teenagers and their idiosyncrasies, and isn’t too embarrassing when looked back on from thirty years later.

Robert Downey Jr

Julianne Moore – The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992)

As the realtor who holds the key to the reason for Rebecca De Mornay’s psychotic dismantling of Annabella Sciorra’s life, Moore made only her second movie, and met a memorable end in a booby-trapped greenhouse. Feisty and forthright – almost a template for some of her future roles – the Oscar-winning actress catches the eye but still doesn’t quite give notice of how good an actress she really is. That would be left to Short Cuts (1993), one of her most memorable performances.

Julianne Moore

Colin Firth – The English Patient (1996)

As the movie’s star-crossed lovers, everyone remembers Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas, but when it comes to the actor playing Thomas’s jilted husband, that’s when the mind may well go completely blank. But Firth matches his (then) more illustrious co-stars, and shows that, only a year after playing Mr Darcy in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice, that he can play a cuckold just as well as a romantic heart-throb.

Colin Firth

Ian McKellen – Last Action Hero (1993)

In amongst Last Action Hero‘s gunfire and car chases and explosions, you may remember towards the end of the movie, the character of Death from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) stepping out of the big screen and into the real world. As audacious homages go it’s a great example of what made the movie so uneven, but McKellen brings the necessary gravitas to the role, and even adds a degree of nonchalant amusement.

Ian McKellen

Amy Adams – Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)

Though Adams has a track record in comedies before and since Talladega Nights, it’s unlikely that most people would place her as Will Ferrell’s love interest, whatever the circumstances (though the glasses may have helped). But as Susan, Ricky Bobby’s assistant-cum-paramour, Adams more than holds her own amidst all the manic goings-on and provides a welcome distraction from the otherwise testosterone-laden script.

Amy Adams

Cameron Diaz – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)

One of a number of cameos in Terry Gilliam’s spirited psychedelic imagining of Hunter S. Thompson’s book, Diaz’s appearance as “Blonde TV Reporter” is brief, but a great example of the kind of “roles” that some stars will take either as a favour to the director, or just to be involved in a particular movie project. Plus it’s always fun to see someone pop up unexpectedly in a movie, even if it’s only for a moment.

Cameron Diaz

Nicolas Cage – The Cotton Club (1984)

Working with his uncle, Francis Ford Coppola, Cage’s turn as Richard Gere’s unpredictable, violent brother is another of the actor’s mercurial early roles, and a reminder of the raw, vital talent that has been lost in the welter of tired, mortgage-paying performances Cage has given us in recent years. Taking what could have been a stereotypical role and giving it the kind of spin only he could, it shows Cage acting up a storm and commanding the viewer’s attention.

Nicolas Cage

Jason Statham – Collateral (2004)

Billed as “Airport Man”, Statham has a small but pivotal role in Michael Mann’s L.A.-set thriller, and he more than holds his own in his scene with Tom Cruise. It’s the kind of unexpected appearance that enriches a movie, and lets the audience know that Statham – already an established star in his own right – can still do character work when required… and very effectively.

Jason Statham

Natalie Portman – Mars Attacks! (1996)

Three years before she became Queen Amidala in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999), Portman took a supporting role as the President’s daughter, Taffy, in Tim Burton’s anarchic alien invasion romp. Sharing scenes with Jack Nicholson and Glenn Close, Portman enters into the spirit of things with gusto, and has one of the best lines in the movie: “Guess it wasn’t the dove.”

Natalie Portman

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The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (2005)

07 Thursday May 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

1950's, Affadaisies, Comedy, Contests, Drama, Jane Anderson, Julianne Moore, Laura Dern, Literary adaptation, Prizes, Review, Terry "Tuff" Ryan, True story, Woody Harrelson

Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, The

D: Jane Anderson / 95m

Cast: Julianne Moore, Woody Harrelson, Trevor Morgan, Ellary Porterfield, Laura Dern, Simon Reynolds, Martin Doyle, David Gardner

In the Fifties, hard-working mother of twelve, Evelyn Ryan (Moore) is a champion contester, winning prizes ranging from a couple of dollars to bicycles to washing machines, and sometimes, larger cash prizes. But with her husband Kelly (Harrelson) drinking away his wages, these prizes often serve as ways to prevent or avoid financial hardship from overwhelming the family entirely.

Raising ten kids, Evelyn often has to find creative ways of managing their finances, and while some of her wins help keep things going, she finds Kelly’s self-loathing and violent outbursts always stop them from having to stave off creditors such as the milkman, Ray (Reynolds) and the bank. Their family life is a mix of minor crises – one of her sons is arrested for theft, their car breaks down when Evelyn and daughter Tuff (Porterfield) take a trip – and major ones – Kelly remortgages their home without telling anyone, Evelyn suffers a fall and cuts her wrists on broken glass.

As the children grow up and begin to leave home, in the Sixties, Evelyn is contacted by Dortha Schaefer (Dern), a fellow contester who invites her to join a select group of women called the Affadaisies. All are contest winners several times over and all live similar lives of domestic drudgery enlivened by their successes. Her first trip to meet the group (where the car breaks down), leads to her being late home, and scares Kelly into thinking that Evelyn has left him. The ensuing confrontation sees Evelyn standing her ground for the first time.

But when she discovers that Kelly hasn’t repaid the mortgage he took out without her knowing, Evelyn has to fall back on winning a major contest sponsored by Dr Pepper. If she can win, then it will mean their being able to keep their home, and the family, together.

Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, The - scene

An adaptation of the memoir by Terry “Tuff” Ryan, and with a screenplay by her, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio is an overly saccharine but enjoyable distraction from the usual dramatics of real life stories, and features yet another effortless performance from Moore. On the surface, Evelyn is a recognisable fixture of the Fifties: the outwardly downtrodden housewife who’s a lot more clued-in than people think. Moore had already portrayed a more dramatic version of the role in Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven (2002), but here she accentuates the nicer, more even-tempered qualities of her character, while retaining an inner steeliness that is more than a match for the violent paroxysms displayed by Harrelson’s Kelly.

As befitting an actress of Moore’s stature and skill, Evelyn Ryan isn’t just a perma-grinned caricature of a Fifties housewife, and nor is she written that way, but Anderson’s only-just-dialled-down-from-day-glo approach to the material often gets in the way, making Evelyn seem impossibly irrepressible despite endless provocation. But Moore shows the character’s strength and determination to keep her family together, and the willingness to make sacrifices to achieve that aim, in such a way that the viewer can only admire Evelyn and the efforts she goes to to ensure everyone is cared for and supported. She’s selfless beyond the call of duty, and Moore inhabits the role in such a way that you never question her motives or her view of the world around her.

Against this, Harrelson has his work cut out for him, as Kelly does appear – initially at least – to be the very embodiment of an emasculated man, his deep-rooted anger at the way his life has turned out eating him from within and spilling out in booze-fuelled rages. But Harrelson shows how hard Kelly is trying to be better, even if he can’t quite achieve it with any consistency, and the scene where Evelyn returns home from visiting the Affadaisies, and Kelly is mad with panic, shows a man who is terrified of being left alone with his demons. In a separate scene we learn the reason for his frustration and anger, and when it’s revealed, the level of Harrelson’s empathy for the character becomes apparent. Always hovering in the background, afraid and uncertain as to how to engage with his children, Kelly is the alcoholic elephant in the room, and Harrelson imbues him with a desperate, overwhelming neediness that makes him surprisingly sympathetic.

Covering over ten years, the movie does tend towards the repetitive in terms of its depiction of Evelyn’s success with contests, presenting as it does a parade of problems that are resolved by the acquisition of an appropriately helpful item (and culminating in the Dr Pepper contest), but there’s enough incident in-between times to make up for the feeling that it’s all been done before, and will be again. The sexual politics of the time are held up for scrutiny, with Doyle’s oily bank manager downplaying Evelyn’s role in financial matters, and Gardner’s blatantly unhelpful priest who exhorts her to “try a little harder” in her marriage.

Away from the performances, it’s the recreation of the Fifties and the early Sixties (in many ways a simpler time for the average American family) that most impresses, with Edward T. McAvoy’s production design, matched by Clive Thomasson’s set decoration, providing the movie with a look and a sheen that DoP Jonathan Freeman exploits at every opportunity. And Terry Ryan’s script is often at its most enjoyable when reprising Evelyn’s abilities at coming up with winning slogans and rhymes, their hokey cleverness a perfect summation of Evelyn’s own outlook on life: cheery, slightly folksy, and always optimistic.

Rating: 8/10 – some may find Evelyn Ryan’s unremittingly cheerful attitude to life a little too much to stomach, but to do so would be to miss the point of Moore’s performance and Terry Ryan’s reminiscences of her mother: that she viewed life as an adventure, whatever the circumstances; as such, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio scores heavily and brightly as a tribute to a woman whose unwavering attitude can – and should be – looked upon as inspiration for us all.

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Still Alice (2014)

05 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Alec Baldwin, Alzheimers, Drama, Early onset Alzheimers, Julianne Moore, Kate Bosworth, Kristen Stewart, Lisa Genova, Literary adaptation, Memory loss, Review, Richard Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland

Still Alice

D: Richard Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland / 101m

Cast: Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart, Kate Bosworth, Hunter Parrish, Shane McRae, Stephen Kunken

Alice Howland (Moore) is a respected linguistics professor at Columbia University. She has a loving husband, John (Baldwin), and three grown up children, Anna (Bosworth), Tom (Parrish), and Lydia (Stewart). Shortly after her fiftieth birthday she gives a lecture and forgets the word ‘lexicon’. She brushes it off but when she’s out running one day she reaches the campus and for one disorientating moment she has no idea where she is. She begins to see a neurologist (Kunken) and undergoes various tests. When it comes, the diagnosis is a shock: she has early onset Alzheimers. Further tests also reveal that it’s familial, and her children are at risk of carrying the recessive gene that causes it.

As expected, the news is a blow to Alice’s family, but she is determined to fight the disease for as long as she can. Her children have different reactions: Anna is tested and is positive; she and her husband, Charlie (McRae), are trying for a baby via an infertility clinic and need to know. Tom tests negative, while Lydia, who is a budding actress living on the West Coast and a bit of a free spirit, decides not to find out. But they and their father all do their best to support Alice as she comes to terms with what her life will become.

But the illness is aggressive, and Alice’s initial coping mechanisms of using her mobile phone to record information, and setting herself little memory tests, lose their effectiveness, and she begins to forget even more. Her awareness of the speed at which her illness is affecting her, leads Alice to record a video message advising her future self to commit suicide by taking a bottle of pills. One day, while she and John are at their beach house, she forgets where the bathroom is and wets herself. As she begins to forget more and more, she receives an invitation to speak at an Alzheimers convention. There she gives a moving description of the ways in which the disease is affecting her but also the ways in which she deals with it.

Alice’s deteriorating mental abilities become more and more obvious. When Lydia performs at a local theatre, Alice forgets her name when they meet up afterwards. And she becomes anxious when John receives an offer to work at the Mayo Clinic, which will mean moving. And then Alice discovers the video message she made earlier…

Still Alice - scene

Adapted from the novel by Lisa Genova, Still Alice is a gloomy, yet also affecting look at the debilitating effects of Alzheimers on an intelligent, academically respected individual, and her immediate family. It’s a straightforward, no frills movie that aims to pull no punches regarding the debilitating aspects of the disease, but can’t quite stop itself from trying to salvage a degree of personal triumph out of Alice’s dilemma. In fact, Still Alice tries so hard to make Alice’s fight against Alzheimers laudatory that it almost misses the tragedy that goes with it hand in hand.

In telling Alice’s story, writer/directors Gratzer and Westmoreland have resorted to charting the gradual effects of the disease by signposting them with often clumsy simplicity. First Alice forgets a word in a lecture, next she forgets where she is, then she forgets someone’s name and their address in a test. As each lapse in memory and example of cognitive impairment is trotted out, their presence in the narrative seems to be crying out, “See? She’s getting worse!”, as if the viewer couldn’t work that out for themselves. And when she’s told that her form of Alzheimers, matched by her intelligence and mental acuity, means that the disease will have a more rapid effect on her, it’s almost like kicking someone when they’re down; not only is Alice already unlucky to be suffering at so young an age, but because she’s so smart it’s another point against her.

This kind of unnecessary melodrama hurts the middle third of the movie so much that it’s only thanks to Moore’s superb performance that it remains so affecting and watchable. Even when the script piles on the pain and anguish she remains utterly believable, painting a sincere, credible portrait of a woman losing her sense of herself, and portraying the terrible ramifications of having her personality destroyed from within. The scene where Alice can’t find the bathroom is a powerful example, as the camera stays with her at waist height as she rushes through the house. When she stops the camera focuses on her face and the evident torment she’s experiencing. The viewer knows exactly what’s happening, from the shame and distress Alice is feeling to the moment where the inevitable happens, and when the camera pans back to reveal the stain down the front of her jogging bottoms it’s nowhere near as effective as the acting masterclass that Moore has honoured us with. Simply put, Moore is astonishing, and when the disease has robbed Alice of nearly all cognisance of the world around her, and her eyes are dulled by incomprehension, it’s heartbreaking.

Sadly, Moore is the best thing in a movie that fails to paint convincing portraits of Alice’s family and resorts to their providing implausible levels of support throughout. Not once does any one of them lose their temper, or voice their own distress at what’s happening to her, or display any hesitation in doing what they can. Even when John is offered the job at the Mayo Clinic and Alice states her reluctance of doing so, the scene is set for the kind of antagonism that must surely happen in these situations. But instead, John swallows his disappointment in seconds and the moment passes. It’s an uncomfortable moment because it feels so false, and Baldwin doesn’t pull it off (for once though, we see another character looking as lost as Alice is). But Baldwin isn’t alone. Each of the supporting cast has their “uncomfortable moment”, Stewart early on when Alice and Lydia have one of those awkward mother-daughter conversations about careers that seems to have been cribbed from a thousand and one other similar mother-daughter conversations in the movies, and which leaves Stewart struggling to make her supposedly independent-minded character sound anything other than petulant. In contrast, Bosworth is the waspish eldest daughter, saddled with lines that are largely derogatory of others and with no obvious reason for her being that way. And Parrish is sidelined pretty much throughout as Alice’s son, allowed only a brief moment to shine (but not say much) at the Alzheimers convention.

With Moore’s formidable performance taken out of the equation, Still Alice skirts perilously close to formulaic disease-of-the-week TV movie status. It’s a movie that wants to say something profound about the way in which a disease as awful as Alzheimers can be managed – albeit in its early stages – and while Alice’s address to the conference is genuinely moving, it relies too heavily on her normal mental capability to be completely persuasive. With other dramatic flaws that weigh the movie down, Glatzer and Westmoreland’s efforts remain lumbering and inconsequential. The movie is also curiously bland to watch, with too many neutral colours in the background, and Alice aside, too many characters who evince emotion with restraint. There’s also a mawkish score by Ilan Eshkeri that only occasionally matches the action for poignancy.

Rating: 6/10 – gaining two points because of the sheer brilliance and sensitivity of Moore’s performance, Still Alice is gripping stuff when Moore is onscreen but turgid and lacking validity when she isn’t; if it wasn’t for her this would be one movie that could be so easily forgotten, and without any attendant grief.

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The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992)

26 Friday Dec 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Annabella Sciorra, Curtis Hanson, Drama, Greenhouse, Julianne Moore, Matt McCoy, Murder, Nanny, Rebecca De Mornay, Revenge, Review, Thriller

Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The

D: Curtis Hanson / 110m

Cast: Annabella Sciorra, Rebecca De Mornay, Matt McCoy, Ernie Hudson, Madeline Zima, Julianne Moore, John de Lancie

Pregnant with her second child, Claire Bartel (Sciorra) attends a routine check up and finds she has a new obstetrician, Dr Mott (de Lancie). During the examination he sexually molests her; later she reports him to the police. Further women come forward and to avoid being brought to trial, Mott kills himself. His pregnant widow (De Mornay) loses her child as a result, and while she recuperates in hospital, she learns of Claire’s involvement in her husband’s problems.

Six months pass. Claire has given birth to a baby boy, Joey. With her husband, Michael (McCoy) and young daughter Emma (Zima) they make for a happy family, but it becomes clear that Claire can’t juggle the needs of looking after their home and children as well as the part-time work she does at a garden centre. They decide to hire a nanny, and soon after, Mott’s widow, posing as Peyton Flanders, gets the job. She moves in and soon begins to undermine the Bartels’ stability: she breast feeds Joey at odd hours so that he won’t feed from Claire; she persuades Emma to keep secrets from Claire; and she intimidates Solomon (Hudson), a mentally challenged man from a local charity home who does odd jobs around the Bartels’ garden.

Peyton does her best to make Claire seem like a bad mother, and tries to upset her relationship with Michael. When Peyton suggests to Michael that they organise a surprise party for Claire, and include their friend Marlene (Moore) in the planning of it, it leads to Claire believing that Michael and Marlene are having an affair. She accuses him on the evening of the party, unaware that Marlene and the rest of their guests are in the next room. Later, Claire tells Michael that she is beginning to have her suspicions about Peyton; this leads to Peyton booby-trapping Claire’s greenhouse in an attempt to kill her. However, the next day Claire goes out instead. Meanwhile, Marlene discovers Peyton’s true identity and rushes over to tell Claire what she’s found out, but Peyton tricks her into going into the greenhouse. The booby-trap works and Marlene is killed. When Claire finds her it triggers an asthma attack that sees her hospitalised.

When she returns home Claire decides to find out why Marlene was at the house that day. She discovers the same truth about Peyton that Marlene did, and tells Michael. They confront her and she leaves… but not for long.

Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The - scene

While there have been plenty of variations on the “home invasion/cuckoo in the nest” storyline prior to the release of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle – Pacific Heights (1990) for example – and a whole shedload of further imitations and variations since its release – Trespass (2011) anyone? – the strength of this particular movie is in its confident direction courtesy of a debuting Hanson, a career best performance from De Mornay, and one of the most impressive (and crowd-pleasing) punches in cinema history.

The basic premise is as old as the hills, but in the hands of Hanson and screenwriter Amanda Silver, it receives a jolt in the arm that elevates the material beyond the type of hokey predictability we’re used to seeing nowadays. The “examination” Claire endures at the hands of Dr Mott is still one of the most uncomfortable scenes you’re ever likely to encounter in a mainstream thriller, a testament to the staging of the scene by Hanson and de Lancie’s disturbing performance. It’s matched by the moment when Peyton stands over Joey’s crib with a cushion in her hands, the viewer unsure if she’ll really smother him. And even though we all know it’s been planted there, the discovery by Claire of a pair of Emma’s panties in Solomon’s toolbox carries a frisson that is somehow all the more effective because of what it will mean for Solomon (though the script, conveniently, lets him off rather lightly considering the allusion being made).

There are other scenes that, while not carrying such dramatic weight, still manage to hook the audience and not let go. Peyton’s machinations are well-constructed and thought out, De Mornay’s icy beauty a perfect match for the character’s psychotic nature; even when she smiles it’s unnerving. Every time she sees an opportunity to further her plans for vengeance, Hanson ratchets up the tension and keeps it there until the inevitable payoff. As the Bartels continue to find their lives falling apart around them, it’s De Mornay who remains the focus, her unsettling malevolence waiting for yet another dastardly manoeuvre to present itself. She’s a hypnotic presence, alluring yet callous (to Solomon: “Are you a retard?”), outwardly supportive yet inwardly seething, and too dangerous to live. De Mornay is impressive from start to finish, playing Peyton as a calculating whirlwind of anger and violence whose path can lead to only one outcome.

As Peyton’s main protagonist, Claire, Sciorra matches De Mornay for intensity but faces an uphill struggle in trying to keep Claire entirely likeable. The script needs her to be too susceptible at times: Peyton only has to mention that she feels something is wrong and Claire will believe her, which, while it helps to drive the narrative forward, leaves the viewer wondering when she’ll stand back and see what’s really happening. Hampered by this too convenient character trait, Sciorra nevertheless succeeds in making Claire sympathetic, and when she unleashes that punch, any doubts the viewer has had about her will evaporate there and then.

With two such compelling performances from its female leads – plus an unsurprisingly strong supporting turn from Moore – it’s a shame then that the male characters suffer in comparison. Michael is a bit of a damp squib, easily sidelined by Peyton at the crunch, and played with a degree of reticence by McCoy, as if he’d realised the character’s shortcomings at an early script reading and decided to play the role accordingly. But it’s Solomon who really drags things down, a slow-witted simpleton intelligent enough to make jokes at the Bartels’ expense, but not so intelligent as to deny an accusation of inappropriate behaviour with a child. It’s not so much a terrible performance, but a terrible and unnecessary characterisation, and the kind that nowadays would be booed or jeered off the screen.

Played out against a background of white and brightly lit interiors, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is buoyed up by a great original score by Graeme Revell, well-lit and sometimes unnerving photography by Robert Elswit, and in the last fifteen minutes, an effectively staged showdown that benefits greatly from the editing skills of John F. Link. But above it all, Hanson directs with all the skill and confidence of somebody making their tenth movie and not their first. Whether he’s using a Louma crane to follow Peyton from the house to the greenhouse, or employing a close up when she attacks Michael, Hanson makes the right choice of shot every time, and shows an economy of style that benefits the movie throughout.

8/10 – some minor issues aside – why don’t the Bartels check Peyton’s reference?, why isn’t anyone questioned about Marlene’s death? – The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is a classy, confidently crafted thriller that touches on themes of motherhood and sacrifice while rightly focusing on Peyton’s thirst for revenge; hard-edged and nail-biting in a way that has been watered down by repetition ever since, this is a thriller that deserves to be remembered for its transgressive moments as well as its formidable performance by De Mornay.

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The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 (2014)

28 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Action, District 13, Donald Sutherland, Drama, Francis Lawrence, Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Julianne Moore, Katniss Everdeen, Liam Hemsworth, Literary adaptation, Mockingjay, Panem, Philip Seymour Hoffman, President Snow, Review, Sci-fi, Suzanne Collins, Woody Harrelson

Hunger Games Mockingjay Part 1, The

D: Francis Lawrence / 123m

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Donald Sutherland, Elizabeth Banks, Sam Claflin, Jeffrey Wright, Mahershala Ali, Willow Shields, Natalie Dormer, Stanley Tucci

Having been rescued from the Quarter Quell Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen (Lawrence), Finnick Odair (Claflin), and Beetee (Wright) find themselves in the underground fortress that is the new District 13, and which has been built beneath the ruins of the old District 13. While Finnick despairs the loss of his lover, Annie Cresta, and Beetee sets about helping the district leaders with their plans to take the fight to the Capitol, Katniss is asked to become the Mockingjay, the symbol of the resistance. She refuses, blaming the District 13 leaders – headed by President Alma Coin (Moore) and ex-gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee (Hoffman) – for not trying to save Peeta Mellark (Hutcherson), Annie, and Johanna Mason who are all prisoners in the Capitol.

Heavensbee decides it would be better to convince Katniss another way, and he arranges for her to visit the ruins of District 12. There she sees the devastation and the remains of her people and is visibly shocked by what’s happened. She agrees to become the Mockingjay but on the condition that the captured Victors are rescued and granted full pardons. Coin agrees and Katniss becomes a part of the rebel propaganda campaign, appearing in videos that are broadcast across the districts and eventually, into the Capitol. These videos lead to uprisings in some of the other districts, including the destruction of the dam that provides the bulk of the Capitol’s electrical power.

An attack on District 13 follows but the underground fortress isn’t breached. Coin sends a team led by security chief Boggs (Ali) and Gale (Hemsworth) to rescue the captured Victors. They find their way in with ease, helped immeasurably by Beetee’s jamming of the Capitol’s security signals. But when Beetee’s transmissions are interrupted, and President Snow himself reveals his awareness of the rescue attempt, the safety of Gale and Boggs and the rest of the team hangs in the balance.

Hunger Games Mockingjay Part 1, The - scene

It’s a rare movie in any franchise that opens with two scenes showing characters in utter despair, but The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 is so confident in its set up, and what it needs to do in this necessarily darker episode, that these two scenes act both as a brief summation of where the story has been and where it is now. It’s also exposition given added weight by an emotional heft that exposition generally doesn’t carry, and gives notice that the writers – Danny Strong and Peter Craig – aren’t going to take the easy route in adapting the first part of Suzanne Collins’ final book in the Hunger Games trilogy.

In fact, this is an even more carefully assembled, and thought out, screenplay than the one that made The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013) so effective. Here, the political machinations are more exposed, the betrayals and compromises crueller than ever, and Katniss’ sense of being alone (even with Prim (Shields) and her mother, and Gale to support her) heightened even more. It’s a movie that looks at the loss of hope and the suspension of faith, and emphasises the way in which personal sacrifice almost always comes at a cost. It’s a bleaker, more anxiety-ridden movie, and in being true to the original source, furthers the series’ own integrity.

The introduction of President Snow’s District 13 counterpart, Alma Coin, is handled incredibly well, with Moore proving an excellent choice in the role. Fans of the book will know where the narrative takes President Coin, but for now the script provides very subtle clues as to the nature of that direction, and Moore gives a clever, finely tuned performance that provides a perfect foil for Sutherland’s spider-like turn as the malevolent Panem president. (It’s a shame that the best verbal sparring is reserved for Snow and Katniss – seeing Coin and Snow exchanging words would be an intense and fascinating encounter.) Moore isn’t on screen a lot but when she is, Coin is an enticingly vivid presence.

But the focus is, of course, on Katniss, and the way in which she deals with this new direction in her life. Lawrence is an intelligent, perceptive actress and she handles the demands of the role – again – with a fierce determination that matches the character and the journey she’s making. Katniss may not be the most emotionally stable young woman you’re ever likely to meet, but she has an inner strength that Lawrence brings to the fore with accomplished ease. Watching her reaction to the horrors of a devastated District 12 shows just why it’s now so difficult to imagine anyone else in the role, so completely does she inhabit the part.

The rest of the characters share varying amounts of screen time, with Gale having a larger part to play this time round, and Effie Trinket (Banks) also benefitting from an expanded role (that wasn’t in the novel; Banks’ previous performances convinced Collins the character needed to be more involved in the final two movies). A newly sober Haymitch (Harrelson) proves less effective as a character, but the actor rises to the challenge of providing the same (required) turn in each movie. Heavensbee reveals himself to be a clever, thoughtful manipulator, and Hoffman has fun with the role, a genial smirk never too far from his features. The relationship between Katniss and Prim continues in the same fashion as before, with their mother still given a background role, and Katniss’ affection for Gale is barely mentioned, leaving her (presumed) love for Peeta to take centre stage. This dynamic, always in doubt during the previous two movies, begins to coalesce into something more tangible here, and leads to one of the most heart-rending, and shocking, scenes in the series so far.

Returning to the director’s chair, Lawrence continues to be a wise choice for the hot seat, and keeps the focus on the characters and their relationships to each other, emphasising the emotional ups and downs that Katniss has to overcome, and the difficult path she has to take as the rebels’ figurehead. Lawrence also keeps the action on point, each sequence plotted and designed for maximum effect, and he brings the other featured districts to life with a well thought out economy. There’s another stirring score courtesy of James Newton Howard, and Jo Willems’ photography maintains the visual style of the previous movie while adding a grittier sheen to things.

Rating: 9/10 – with one more movie to go, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 is a memorable, thrilling addition to the series, and perfectly sets up Part 2; with a handful of superb performances, and a director firmly in control of the material, this instalment stands as a perfect example of how to make a bridging chapter relevant and exciting in equal measure.

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Evolution (2001)

01 Saturday Nov 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Aliens, Comedy, David Duchovny, Glen Canyon, Ivan Reitman, Julianne Moore, Meteor, Orlando Jones, Review, Sci-fi, Seann William Scott

Evolution

D: Ivan Reitman / 101m

Cast: David Duchovny, Julianne Moore, Orlando Jones, Seann William Scott, Ted Levine, Ethan Suplee, Michael Bower, Pat Kilbane, Ty Burrell, Dan Aykroyd, Katharine Towne

A meteor crash lands outside of the small Arizona town of Glen Canyon, punching a hole through the ground and coming to rest in a cavern.  A professor at the local university, Harry Block (Jones), is also a member of the US Geological Service.  When he hears about the meteor he heads for the site with his friend and fellow professor, ira Kane (Duchovny).  They meet Wayne (Scott) who was there when the met or landed.  Harry and Ira descend into the cavern and find that the meteor is still warm, and when they begin taking a sample from it, they also discover that it releases a strange blue liquid, almost as if it were bleeding.  They take the sample back to Ira’s lab where he discovers that the liquid contains micro-organisms that appear to be single-celled, and which are definitely extraterrestrial in origin.

He breaks the news to Harry and they go back to the crash site with some of their students on the pretence of conducting a field trip (and to remove the meteor).  They find the beginnings of an entirely new eco-system, as well as evidence of evolutionary advances that are happening far too quickly.  When a flatworm dies from excess oxygen, Ira realises the importance of what they’ve discovered, and convinces Harry to  keep things to themselves until they can assess matters further (it helps that Harry is focused on a potential Nobel prize at some time in the future).

Meanwhile, while working at the local country club, Wayne sees evidence of the flatworms having spread further than the meteor site but he doesn’t say anything to anyone.  Harry and Ira return again to the cavern but are stopped when they find the site has been turned into a restricted military area overseen by General Woodman (Levine).  It turns out that Woodman was once Ira’s boss and that Ira has a checkered past involving an experimental virus that produced some unfortunate side effects.  Helped by Center for Disease Control scientist Alison Reed (Moore), Woodman takes over the site and bars ira and Harry from any further involvement.

While the military continue to monitor the cavern’s growing eco-system, and the creatures that are evolving there, other creatures are finding their way into the local community.  At the country club, one of the members is killed by a creature that is in turn killed by Wayne.  He takes the corpse to Ira and Harry; they later learn that dozens of creatures have died near the meteor site due to being oxygen intolerant.  When one gives birth to its offspring, a dragon-like creature, before dying, the newborn proves able to breathe properly and it flies off to cause mayhem at a nearby shopping centre.  Harry, Ira and Wayne track it down and kill it before warning General Woodman about the growing menace.  Under increasing pressure from the state governor (Aykroyd), Woodman advocates napalming the cavern and the tunnels that spur off from it.  But when Ira and co discover that heat speeds up the creatures’ evolutionary process, they face a race against time to stop them from over-running the planet.

Evolution - scene

An often raucous, good-natured sci-fi romp, Evolution is the type of comic fantasy that makes no bones about how absurd or ridiculous it might be, and throws caution, logic and plausibility as far out of the window as it can manage.  There’s a boisterous, almost schoolboy aesthetic going on, with Jones’ sex-obsessed geology teacher, Scott’s not-so-bright would-be fireman, and Duchovny’s good-natured ex-military scientist proving a good mix, and bolstered by Moore’s clumsy, well-meaning disease expert.  All four are clearly having fun and their enthusiasm, added to the script’s sense of mischief (courtesy of Don Jakoby, David Diamond and David Weissman), makes for an entertaining monster movie that flaunts its lack of scientific realism with wild abandon.

With its focus on making things as fun as possible, Evolution plays out like a movie whose basic concept was probably much simpler, but which, luckily, ended up being a whole lot more involved and wonderfully, gloriously silly.  There’s almost too much to enjoy: Wayne’s practice run at saving a woman from a burning building; Harry’s one-liners – “There’s ALWAYS time for lubricant!” – and extravagant facial expressions; Ira’s mooning of General Woodman; an encounter with Ira’s ex-girlfriend (played by Sarah Silverman); and Aykroyd’s pissed off state governor.  Amidst all the human levity, it would be easy to forget that there are some pretty weird alien creatures to deal with as well, but Reitman co-ordinates things with his trademark ease, and grounds the action with just enough unexpected gravitas to make the threat more credible than it might initially appear.

With the cast on top form, and Reitman orchestrating things with his usual aplomb, the occasional lapse can be forgiven – a cringe-inducing amount of sexist behaviour from Harry, Suplee and Bower being in Ira’s class in the first place (though it’s still funny) – and some of the creature effects are poorly integrated into the action, but there are some great desert locations that are beautifully photographed by Michael Chapman, and John Powell’s stirring score complements the movie throughout.

Rating: 8/10 – preposterous and silly, Evolution is nevertheless the kind of guilty pleasure you can brag about to your friends; even if you only watch it for Harry’s rectal procedure, it will still have been all worthwhile.

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Maps to the Stars (2014)

05 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Actress, Black comedy, Chauffeur, Child actor, David Cronenberg, Drama, Dysfunctional family, Evan Bird, Hollywood, John Cusack, Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, Olivia Williams, P.A., Review, Robert Pattinson, Self-help guru

Maps to the Stars

D: David Cronenberg / 111m

Cast: Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, John Cusack, Evan Bird, Olivia Williams, Robert Pattinson, Sarah Gadon, Kiara Glasco, Dawn Greenhalgh

Arriving in Los Angeles, Agatha (Wasikowska) is met by limo driver/aspiring actor Jerome (Pattinson).  On the way to where she’s staying she asks him to drive to a spot up in the hills near to the Hollywood sign, though when they get there there isn’t a house where Agatha expects it to be.  Meanwhile, child actor Benjie Weiss (Bird) is in the middle of negotiations to star in the sequel to the movie that has made him a star.  However, a recent bout of substance abuse has the studio insisting on his sobriety.  At the same time, well-known actress Havana Segrand (Moore) is doing all she can to land the part her mother played in a remake of a 60’s classic.  Through a lucky piece of networking, Agatha ends up working for Havana as her P.A.

Agatha has burns from a fire that happened when she was younger and it’s revealed that she’s spent the last seven years in a psychiatric hospital as she caused the fire.  Her reason for coming to L.A. is to make amends to her family, parents Stafford (Cusack) and Christina (Williams), and her brother, who it turns out is Benjie.  When they learn she’s back in town they have different reactions but she sees them each in turn with differing results.  As troubled as Agatha is, she’s unaware of the ghosts Benjie sees, ghosts that are pushing him toward a violent outburst.  And Havana is tormented by visions of her mother (Gadon) before she died, visions that feed into her insecurity about playing her mother’s role.  A relationship blossoms with Jerome but is eventually undermined by Havana, while one of Benjie’s hallucinations causes a tragedy he can’t run away from… except with Agatha.  With violence blighting both their lives, they decide on a solution to their problems that will give them both peace from the demons that haunt them.

Maps to the Stars - scene

The first movie that David Cronenberg has made – if only partially – in the US, Maps to the Stars is a biting satire that explores the various tensions within one of the most dysfunctional families in recent movie history.  The Weisses are so screwed up as a family it’s a wonder any of them can function normally on a day to day basis.  Dad Stafford is a self-help guru cum massage therapist whose sense of his own relevance is underlined by the famous people he’s met, like the Dalai Lama.  He’s distant from his wife and son, and is worried that any adverse publicity will expose the secret he and Christina have shared for years.  For her part, Christina acts as a kind of manager for her son’s career, advising him and attending meetings with the studio.  She gets little recognition for her efforts from him, and she too is afraid their secret will be revealed. Both characters are unhappy and edgy in their own skins, and there is a distance between them that has become enforced through necessity, but their dependence on each other is the only way they can express their love for each other.

Benjie is thirteen and the kind of spoilt-minded child actor who thinks it’s okay to disrespect people and be abusive and mean-minded.  There’s a certain amount of insecurity about him, but it’s smothered by his “fuck you” attitude, and his need to be in control of his own life, independent of his parents.  By contrast, Agatha is the child who wants to make amends, who wants to see her family reunited, but doesn’t realise – or expect – that her optimism is misguided.  Her troubled history (controlled by several different medications) is in danger of defining her as an individual, and her job with Havana, and her romance with Jerome, help boost her confidence in dealing with Benjie and her parents.  When they both go wrong, she discards her meds, and it’s only when she does that she’s truly able to deal with things, even if the way in which she does is far from appropriate.  Self-confidence aside, it’s her schizophrenia that keeps her strong.

All four actors – Cusack, Williams, Bird and Wasikowska – prove excellent choices for their roles, and each one holds the viewer’s attention with ease in each of their scenes; when some of them are together, it’s like an embarrassment of riches, and it’s good to see Cusack back on form after the likes of Drive Hard and The Prince (both 2014).  But this is Moore’s movie all the way, her portrayal of an actress on the verge of becoming irrelevant both tragic and horrifying in its naked neediness and self-serving hypocrisy.  Moore’s no stranger to tortured female characters (whether self-inflicted or not), and here she adds yet another to the list, making Havana pitiable, self-destructive and venal in equal measure.  It’s a bravura performance, with Moore displaying Havana’s emotional vulnerability and lack of empathy, particularly in the horrifying scene where she celebrates getting her mother’s role through tragic circumstances.  She’s hypnotic to watch, and by far the best part of seeing the movie.

Good as the performances are though (and they are very good), there isn’t any easy way to connect with the characters.  Agatha has most of the viewer’s sympathy, but that slowly changes as the movie progresses.  Benjie is virtually irredeemable, while Stafford and Christina are too wrapped up in themselves to care about anyone else.  This is also a movie made with a degree of distance between the characters and the audience, and this appears to be down to Cronenberg’s approach to both them and Bruce Wagner’s screenplay.  His direction is as inventive as ever, and he deposits the Weisses and Havana in various large, open spaces to highlight their isolation (particularly their own homes).  As a movie that shines a light on how dysfunction and self-destruction can both encourage and propel certain people toward terrible actions, it’s a triumph.  But as a movie that identifies root causes and solid motivations for those actions it’s not so successful, leaving the viewer to scratch their head at how the characters can be so self-destructive, and with no attempts to seek help (even from Stafford).

However, there is a degree of dark humour here that some audiences will recognise, as well as moments of soap opera absurdity that threaten to undermine the overall cleverness of the script.  These are also predictable moments, and while some are necessary for certain storylines to move forward, it’s a shame that they’ve been included, as they actually cause the movie’s flow to stutter when they occur.  Still, there’s more here that’s good than bad, and it’s compelling on several levels.

Rating: 8/10 – another winner from Cronenberg, Maps to the Stars has a few, minor faults, and will certainly divide audiences, but fans will lap it up, while newcomers to Cronenberg’s oeuvre may be non-plussed by the observational approach; with a raft of intriguing, well-constructed performances, the movie offers far more than is obvious at first glance.

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Non-Stop (2014)

11 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Air marshal, Bomb, Hijacking, Iceland, Jaume Collet-Serra, Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, Lupita Nyong'o, Michelle Dockery, Ransom demand, Review, Scoot McNairy, Secure network, Transatlantic flight

Non-Stop

D: Jaume Collet-Serra / 106m

Cast: Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore, Scoot McNairy, Michelle Dockery, Nate Parker, Corey Stoll, Lupita Nyong’o, Omar Metwally, Jason Butler Harner, Linus Roache, Shea Whigham, Anson Mount

Non-Stop – or the continuing adventures of Liam Neeson in action movie land – starts off promisingly enough with air marshal Bill Marks (Neeson) preparing to board a flight to London from New York.  He looks a mess, he’s drinking, he’s obviously got problems, and he has a gun.  Once the flight is underway, Marks begins to get text messages over the air marshal network, which should be secure.  If the mystery person sending the texts isn’t paid $150 million dollars then someone on the plane will die every twenty minutes until it is.  Marks thinks it’s probably some kind of elaborate practical joke, and challenges the other air marshal on the plane, Hammond (Mount) about it, but it’s soon made clear Hammond didn’t send the messages.  He alerts the captain and the cabin staff as a precaution, and also his boss at the Transport Security Administration (TSA).  Only Marks takes the threat seriously.  As the first twenty minute marker nears, Marks finds himself attacked by Hammond (who, it turns out, is being coerced by the texter) and is forced to kill him, thereby doing the texter’s work for him.  Marks also discovers that Hammond was carrying a briefcase full of cocaine.

With Marks attempting to keep Hammond’s death from the crew and passengers – and no one making any attempt to use the toilet Hammond’s body is in – the plot thickens as it’s revealed that the account the texter wants the money transferred into is in Marks’ name.  With suspicion mounting against him, Marks attempts to discover the texter’s identity by checking the passengers’ cell phones.  Some of the passengers take umbrage at this, particularly NY cop Reilly (Stoll), and communications tech White (Parker).  When another murder takes place after forty minutes, Marks’ behaviour becomes increasingly more desperate as he attempts to locate the texter, alienating both the crew and passengers further, and as events unfold, putting himself in the frame for what is now being seen by the outside world as a hijacking.  Even the TSA believe he’s gone bad.  And when he discovers there’s a bomb on the plane, Marks must do all he can to save the plane and himself.

Non-Stop - scene

A movie like Non-Stop can be taken (no pun intended), in one of two ways: as a leave-your-brain-at-the-door-and-go-with-it type of movie that could end up being a fun ride, or as yet another dire attempt by Hollywood to provide thrills and spills but without any kind of focus on logic or credibility – still a fun ride perhaps, but one that coasts on its high concept and promise of seeing Neeson doing what he (currently) does best: kick ass.  In either circumstance, though, Non-Stop is a let-down, a polished yet soulless piece of work that is, seriously, a real piece of work.

The fault here lies squarely with the script by John W. Richardson, Christopher Roach and Ryan Engle, which piles on absurdity after absurdity and never lets you forget that credibility isn’t an issue.  As Marks gets ever more desperate to discover the texter’s identity, and he violates the passengers’ rights with ever-increasing enthusiasm, the script never pauses to wonder if there might be any actual protocols involved in dealing with such an admittedly unusual situation.  When Marks tells everyone about the bomb and a “damage limitation” procedure, you’re not sure if the script has made it up or it does exist in the real world.  Two fighters are scrambled to fly alongside the airliner and with instructions to shoot down the plane if it drops to 8,000 feet or below because then it becomes a civilian threat.  But the plane is flying over the Atlantic and is being directed to land in Iceland, not exactly the most populous of locations.  Two of the victims are killed by poison dart; neither could have happened in the way they do and the script doesn’t even challenge itself to come up with anything more clever; it settles far too often for a “well, this happens, and then this happens, and it just does” kind of approach.

When the texter’s identity and his or her reasons for doing all this are revealed, it’s such a weak excuse the viewer can only shake their head in dismay and move on to the rapidly approaching finale.  It’s also a pretty woolly excuse, and delivered with all the earnestness and conviction of someone trying to explain why they’ve just done something so stupid they’re terminally embarrassed about it (like signing on to be the villain in Non-Stop).

As the script is so poor, and character motivations almost on the nearly extinct list, the cast fare badly, unable to do anything other than say the lines and hit their marks.  Neeson tries valiantly to make his role work but he’s hampered by having to be a hero when it would have been so much more effective if there had been some real doubt as to his involvement in the hijacking.  Moore is on hand to provide support as the passenger who never doubts Marks for a moment, while McNairy, Stoll, Parker, Metwally and others are trotted out as potential hijackers as the guessing game continues.  Dockery, escaping from Downton Abbey (and maybe changing agents at this very moment) is only required to look shocked and surprised at various moments, while Nyong’o, after her triumph in 12 Years a Slave, is saddled with the role of stewardess-most-required-to-scream-and-panic-a-lot.

Collet-Serra directs with ambition and a certain flair, keeping the visual side of things interesting, and making good use of the cramped conditions.  However, even he can’t make much of the dire script, and as a result, the cast suffer even further, some, like Dockery, seemingly cast adrift.  The action sequences are casually brutal yet effective, though the crash landing at the end won’t be the best use of CGI seen this year.  If there is to be a Non-Stop 2 – and we can only pray there won’t be – it will have to be a great deal better than this to warrant a return flight.

Rating: 5/10 – as a popcorn movie, Non-Stop just about makes it, but with serious reservations; laughable in places, frustrating to watch, and just too dumb for its own good.

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Carrie (2013)

11 Saturday Jan 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Bullying, Chloë Grace Moretz, Horror, Julianne Moore, Kimberly Peirce, Prom, Religion, Remake, Review, Stephen King, Telekinesis

Carrie (2013)

D: Kimberly Peirce / 100m

Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, Julianne Moore, Gabriella Wilde, Portia Doubleday, Judy Greer, Alex Russell, Zoë Belkin, Ansel Elgort, Barry Shabaka Henley

When seventeen-year-old Carrie White (Moretz), already a social misfit at the school she attends, has her first period and doesn’t realise what’s happening, her fear and confusion leads to her classmates throwing tampons and sanitary napkins at her, and yelling at her to “plug it up”. This humiliating event is filmed by the worst of her tormentors, Chris Hargenson (Doubleday), and is later posted on the Internet. Stopped by their teacher Ms Desjardin (Greer), the girls are punished by having to stay after school and do repetitive exercises. Chris rebels against this and ends up being suspended; this means she will miss the upcoming school prom. Angered by what she feels is a terrible injustice, Chris vows to get even with Carrie (though not with Ms Desjardin).

For Carrie, her problems don’t end at the school gates. Her mother, Margaret (Moore), governs their lives according to her strict religious beliefs. Carrie tries to explain how terrified she’d been when her period started, but Margaret, her beliefs skewed by a pathological fear of sexual intimacy, berates her daughter for “becoming a woman” and locks her in a closet. Carrie’s anger surfaces and with just her mind she causes a jagged tear to appear down the centre of the closet door. With both mother and daughter realising there is going to be a shift in their relationship – and in Carrie’s favour – a tense line is drawn, and Margaret, now wary of the daughter she has controlled so easily until now, fears for both their futures.

While Chris plots her revenge, another of Carrie’s classmates, Sue Snell (Wilde), ashamed of how she behaved, tries to make amends by persuading her boyfriend Tommy (Elgort) to take Carrie to the prom instead of her. Tommy is initially resistant to the idea but eventually agrees, and asks Carrie if she’d like to go with him. Surprised but flattered (even if she doubts his sincerity to begin with), Carrie agrees. At the prom, and as part of Chris’s revenge, Carrie and Tommy are crowned Prom King and Queen. As they bask in the applause and approbation of their peers, Chris and her boyfriend Billy (Russell) drop two buckets of pig’s blood down onto Carrie and Tommy. The shock and the humiliation is too much and Carrie, using her nascent telekinetic powers, proceeds to take her revenge on everyone there.

Carrie (2013) - scene

Updated in minor ways for a new decade, Carrie plods its way uncomfortably from one leaden scene to the next, never fully convincing and never fully engaging the audience. As a remake it fails to justify its existence thanks to two main problems, both of which are insurmountable: Peirce’s direction and Moretz’s performance.

Peirce – still best known for Boys Don’t Cry (1999) – here proves a bad fit for the material, her approach leading to a curiously flat, matter-of-fact retelling that never takes off or impresses that much. It’s as if she’s decided to film events at a remove, keeping a distance between the audience and the characters so that any empathy the viewer may have is kept from flourishing. For a story with such a strong, emotional resonance, and centred around the age old topics of bullying and female empowerment, it’s even more surprising that Peirce has been unable to connect with the themes inherent in the script. This extends to the performances as well, which – Moore and Moretz aside – are perfunctory and/or lethargic.

Moore is a great choice for Margaret White, and expresses the religious paranoia that has blighted her life, and her daughter’s life, with a real sense of conviction. She’s like a coiled snake, biding its time until the right moment to strike. Moore is the best thing in Carrie but it’s effectively a supporting role and so she’s not on screen enough to make a difference.

Someone who is on screen too much, though, is Moretz, a moderately talented young actress whose rise to stardom on the back of the Kick-Ass movies has meant her being given more praise than is deserved, and who is cruelly shown to be lacking the acting skills needed to portray a character such as Carrie White. She may be the right age but the part requires an actress who is both older and more experienced. Moretz does her best but she’s just not up to it. She isn’t at all convincing as a put-upon teenager, and when required to show the pain and discomfort her life at home has engendered, there’s barely anything for the audience to latch on to. Worse still is the wide-eyed, “did-someone-just-goose-me?” stare she adopts for her telekinetic rampage; if it was intended to make her look scary then someone wasn’t checking the dailies.

With Peirce’s feather light touch on proceedings and Moretz’s underwhelming performance putting the movie at a disadvantage from the risible opening to the even more risible denouement, Carrie fails to meet its audience even halfway. The script is serviceable enough but there’s a lack of effort all round: even Carrie’s destruction of the prom is done half-heartedly, leaving a feeling of “was that it?” in the air.  In horror terms, this has to be the biggest disappointment of 2013.

Rating: 4/10 – yet another poor adaptation of a Stephen King novel/short story/laundry list, Carrie lacks the brio and energy needed to carry it off; turgid in the extreme and saved only by Moore’s creepy performance and a sequence that wouldn’t look out of place in a Final Destination movie.

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Don Jon (2013)

05 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Casual sex, Comedy, Drama, Joseph-Gordon-Levitt, Julianne Moore, One-night stands, Porn, Relationships, Review, Scarlett Johansson

Don Jon

D: Joseph Gordon-Levitt / 90m

Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Scarlett Johansson, Julianne Moore, Tony Danza, Glenne Headly, Brie Larson, Rob Brown, Jeremy Luke

Jon (Gordon-Levitt) is young, brash, cocky, and with his buddies, more comfortable rating women out of ten than engaging with them on a more meaningful level.  Although Jon has a lot of one-night stands, he finds the sex unfulfilling; often, once the women he’s with are asleep, he’ll go and fire up his laptop and masturbate to online porn.  For Jon, this kind of sexual activity is more rewarding than the real thing, and it dominates his life and his attitude to relationships.

When he meets Barbara (Johansson) in a club and she rebuffs his advances, he finds himself intrigued by her, and what begins as a chase to get her to sleep with him soon becomes more serious as Jon realises he has stronger feelings for Barbara than he would have thought possible.  When Barbara agrees to go out with him, she tells Jon the only thing she asks for is complete honesty; if he lies to her their relationship will be over.  Unable or unwilling to give up online porn, it’s only a matter of time before Jon slips up.  Will their relationship survive?  Will Jon change his ways to keep Barbara in his life, or will Jon’s addiction to porn continue to hamper his emotional growth?

The answers to these questions are all answered by a film that is only notionally edgy, and wants to argue the question of men’s use of porn from the perspective of both camps: the one where it’s okay (but not in a relationship), and the one where it is completely wrong altogether.  There’s a middle ground but for the purposes of this movie, first-time writer/director Gordon-Levitt focuses on the absolute wrongs and rights of the issue.  It makes for a starker, more clear-cut approach to the material and the characters reactions to porn, but at the same time, makes anticipating the outcome a little too easy.  Jon sees porn as the answer to all those unhappy fumbles one night stands often end up becoming, where a lack of awareness of each other’s likes and dislikes can lead to disappointment all round.  Jon wants solid, satisfying sex every time; once actual people are involved, well, there’s the problem.

Don Jon - scene

As a critique of modern sexual etiquette, Don Jon takes a mainly male point of view and leaves the female perspective largely undeveloped.  While Jon – thanks to well-written and conceived voice overs – expresses his feelings, however stunted, Barbara is less accessible.  She believes in love, that much is obvious, and she relishes the type of romantic chick flick where true love conquers everything, but aside from the need for honesty she remains the deus ex machina required to bring Jon up short and get him to rethink his approach to women and sex.  And to further help him, Jon meets Esther (Moore) at night school.  She catches him watching porn on his phone, but isn’t fazed by it; instead, the next time she sees him, she brings him some porn DVDs to watch.  As their relationship begins to broaden, the audience is left to wonder if Esther will free Jon of his predilection for porn, thus allowing him to grow as a person and begin to trust in relationships.

Putting aside the issue of porn and its mass consumption by men whether in or out of a relationship, Gordon-Levitt’s main focus seems to be on the emotional distancing that can arise out of such a dependency.  When we first meet Jon he’s not actually that likeable.  He has a boyish charm, sure, but his attitude is off-putting and offensive.  He works hard, goes to the gym where he works even harder, meets his buddies at the weekend, goes to church each Sunday with his family (and where he confesses the number of sexual liaisons he’s had), and all the while treats women like accessories.  As the movie progresses, and his relationship with Barbara becomes more and more important to him, his weakness for porn proves too much.  It’s at this point that, much as the audience might not realise it, Jon becomes more sympathetic.  We’ve all been in situations where we can’t help ourselves and we do the wrong thing even though we know it’ll get us in trouble, and it’s the same for Jon.  He just can’t resist the lure of unattached, unemotional sex.  When Barbara discovers he’s been lying about porn, you can’t help but feel sorry for the guy, but only because you begin to realise that, thanks to his avoiding commitment for all this time, he just doesn’t have a clue.

It’s a clever twist on Gordon-Levitt’s part and offsets the likelihood that Don Jon is going to be pro-porn all the way through.  As it is, the porn on display is unlikely to upset any but the most prurient of viewers, and the movie is far from explicit.  On an emotional level, Gordon-Levitt’s script provides the necessary number of beats to show Jon’s burgeoning awareness of the benefits of a fully committed relationship, and the performances are effective and well-judged (Danza, as Jon’s father, is a stand-out).  (Though as already noted, Johansson isn’t given a great deal to work with.)  The script is clever, laugh-out-loud funny in places, and each scene is tooled to produce the maximum effect.  As a director, Gordon-Levitt displays a confident approach to his own material, and handles the cast with supportive aplomb; he also knows when to keep the camera on a particular character, something of a lost art these days.  The movie is attractive to look at, boasts a great score courtesy of Nathan Johnson, and while it ends somewhat abruptly, certainly doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Rating: 8/10 – uneven in places but awash with good intentions, Don Jon isn’t quite the challenging movie it might appear; it is heartfelt though, and marks Gordon-Levitt as a writer/director to watch out for.  Oh, and despite what you might believe, this is a perfect date movie.

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