Tag Archives: World War II

Welcome to Marwen (2018)

05 Saturday Jan 2019

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D: Robert Zemeckis / 116m

Cast: Steve Carell, Leslie Mann, Diane Kruger, Janelle Monáe, Gwendoline Christie, Merritt Wever, Eiza González, Leslie Zemeckis, Stefanie von Pfetten, Neil Jackson, Falk Hentschel, Conrad Coates

Following a vicious beating by five white supremacists that robbed him of any personal memories he had before the attack, illustrator Mark Hogancamp (Carell) has managed to rebuild much of his life, but he’s no longer able to draw. Instead, he has created the fictional Belgian town of Marwen, a one-sixth scale model of which he’s built in his yard. Populated by dolls that represent some of the people who have been important to him since the attack, Mark has created a World War II storyline for the dolls of Marwen, and he takes photographs of them in carefully staged positions. These photographs have become regarded as art, and an exhibition of his work is due to take place in the near future. Also due to take place is the sentencing hearing of the men who attacked him, something that Mark’s lawyer (Coates) is pressing him to attend. But with Mark suffering from PTSD, and the Marwen stories occupying so much of his time, it’s only the sympathetic attention of a new neighbour, Nicol (Mann), that starts to bring Mark back to reality…

They say that truth is stranger than fiction, and that’s certainly the case with Mark Hogancamp, a man so violently assaulted that his attackers literally “kicked the memory” out of him. In creating the fictional village of Marwen, Hogancamp gave himself a way back to “normality”, even if it was through the use of an alternate, fantasy world populated by revamped Barbie dolls and Nazi soldiers who never die. It’s this aspect of the movie, with its model sets and plastic toy figures and props that makes the most impression, and Zemeckis – no stranger to giving life to CGI characters based on real people and performances – gives these scenes an urgency and a vibrancy that makes Marwen the kind of place we’d all like to visit (even if we’re likely to be shot at by marauding Nazis). With a great deal of charm, and visual wit, Zemeckis and co-scripter Caroline Thompson have created a cinematic variation of Hogancamp’s imagination and story-telling that is in its own way, brave and affecting, and which touches on more serious themes such as gender identity, persistent emotional trauma, drug addiction, and social isolation. There’s plenty of humour here too, but it’s more knowing than it is overt, and there’s a sadness behind it that make it all the more effective.

But while the scenes with Cap’n Hogie and his female coterie are the backbone of the movie and its MVP, the rest of the movie feels more fanciful and fictitious than the idea of dolls toting sub-machine guns and wearing stilettoes during wartime (look it up). Hogancamp is portrayed as a lovable yet tormented man who is personable yet reserved, and socially awkward, yet the introduction of Nicol, whose character feels like a stock idea lifted wholesale from Screenplay 101, grates with every scene she appears in (despite the best efforts of both Carell and Mann), while Hogancamp’s PTSD is laid on with the thickest of dramatic trowels. Carell at least has the measure of the character, but is hampered by the script’s insistence on making him depth-free, and something of a perennial man-child. Elsewhere in the “real world”, there are a number of stodgy contrivances – Nicol’s ex-boyfriend and nasty piece of work, Kurt (Jackson), exists only so he can double for the chief Nazi in Marwen, Nicol is completely unfazed and unconcerned by Hogancamp’s liking for wearing women’s shoes – and after a while any excuse to return to Marwen is likely to be gratefully accepted by the viewer, because that’s where the movie’s true heart and soul resides.

Rating: 6/10 – immensely enjoyable when the action is based in and around Marwen, but stilted and perfunctory when set away from there, Welcome to Marwen is a movie that struggles to balance both halves of its necessarily fractured narrative; Zemeckis directs with his usual flair and gift for visual flamboyance (and gets to include a clever nod to Back to the Future), but is let down by his own decision to make the real world look and sound like a bad soap opera, and by making the dolls more human than the humans.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018)

25 Sunday Nov 2018

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D: Mike Newell / 124m

Cast: Lily James, Michiel Huisman, Glen Powell, Matthew Goode, Jessica Brown Findlay, Katherine Parkinson, Penelope Wilton, Tom Courtenay, Kit Connor, Bronagh Gallagher, Bernice Stegers, Clive Merrison

In 1946, author Juliet Ashton (James) is in the middle of promoting her latest book, when two things happen simultaneously: The Times Literary Supplement asks her to write a series of articles on the benefits of literature, and she receives a letter from a Guernsey man named Dawcey Adams (Huisman) who is part of a literary society on the island. Intrigued by the idea of a literary society formed during the war, Juliet opts to visit Guernsey and meet Adams and the other members. Just before she sails from London, her American beau, Mark (Powell), proposes to her and she accepts. On Guernsey, Juliet meets all but one of the members of the literary society, and is told that the absent member, Elizabeth McKenna (Findlay), is away on the continent. When she mentions writing an article about the group, one of them, Amelia Maugery (Wilton), refuses to agree to the idea. Sensing there are things that she’s not being told, Juliet remains on the island and soon finds herself beginning to piece together the mystery surrounding Elizabeth’s absence…

Based on the novel of the same name (and how could it be anything different?) by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a lightweight slice of rose-tinted nostalgia filtered through the lens of modern movie-making techniques, and with even less substance than the culinary creation in its title (which sounds like a stodge-fest of epic proportions). It’s by-the-numbers movie making with no surprises, an ending you can guess all the way from the rings of Saturn, and as many softly poignant moments designed to raise a tear that can be squeezed into a two-hour run time. It’s cosy, and reassuring in its approach, and it requires almost no effort at all in watching it. In short, it’s a perfectly enjoyable confection that’s written and directed and performed with a keen understanding that it has to be made in a certain way, and that way is to provide audiences with the cinematic equivalent of comfort food. So lightweight is it that the mystery of Elizabeth’s absence isn’t even the most dramatic aspect of the movie – and that’s bcause there’s nothing dramatic about any of it, no matter how hard the script tries, and no matter how hard its director tries also.

Thankfully, all this doesn’t mean that the movie is a bad one, just predictable and bland and almost a perfect tick box exercise in terms of it being a romantic drama with a wartime background. It does feature a clutch of good performances, with James suitably bullish and radiant at the same time, Courtenay delivering yet another example of his recent run of lovable old codgers, Goode effortlessly suave and supportive as Juliet’s publisher, and Powell as the boyfriend who you know is going to be dumped near the end to ensure that true love prevails as it should. Only Huisman looks out of place (and there’s a distinct awkwardness and lack of chemistry between him and James), while Parkinson and Wilton deliver pitch-perfect portrayals of a gin-making (and swigging) spinster, and a still grieving mother respectively. It’s handsomely mounted (though sadly, none of it was actually shot on Guernsey), with impressive production design and period detail, and equally impressive effects shots detailing some of the destruction suffered by London during the Blitz. But still, there’s that traditional romantic storyline that anchors the movie and keeps it from straying too far into original territory. And if there’s one thing that the movie knows above all else, it’s that familiarity – when done correctly – is all you need.

Rating: 7/10 – a movie that can be criticised easily for what it doesn’t do, The Guersey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a modest movie with modest ambitions, and likely to have a modest effect on its audience; a good-natured bit of celluloid fluff, it’s perfect viewing for a wet and windy Sunday afternoon, or when all you need is something that doesn’t require too much effort in order to enjoy it fully.

Hurricane (2018)

11 Sunday Nov 2018

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aka Hurricane: Squadron 303

D: David Blair / 108m

Cast: Iwan Rheon, Milo Gibson, Stefanie Martini, Marcin Dorociński, Krystof Hádek, Christopher Jaciow, Slawomir Doliniec, Radoslaw Kaim, Adrian Zaremba, Hugh Alexander, Nicholas Farrell, Rosie Gray

Having seen their country overrun by the Nazis, a number of Polish fighter pilots, including Jan Zumbach (Rheon) and Witold Urbanowicz (Dorociński), find their way to England where they join the Royal Air Force. It’s 1940, and Britain is suffering heavy casualties in the air, and is fast running out of both planes and pilots. With the RAF top brass unwilling to let them fly their best planes because of doubts about their skills and experience, it takes a while for the Poles to find a role in the War. Eventually, they form 303 Squadron, based at RAF Northolt aerodrome, and take to the skies during the Battle of Britain. Their courage and determination brings them aerial glory, and despite some resentment among some of the British pilots, the Poles soon find themselves highly regarded. Jan begins a relationship with a WAAF called Phyllis (Martini), but as the war continues and inevitably, his comrades are killed, Jan begins to experience an ambivalence about the war that sees him become angrier and more reckless…

Of the many stories to come out of World War II, the story of the Polish fighter pilots who served in the RAF is one of the more remarkable. In the first six weeks of combat, they claimed an unprecedented hundred and twenty six kills, and by the end of the war, 303 Squadron had the highest ratio of enemy aircraft destroyed to their own lost. With such a notable history, it’s a shame then that Hurricane resorts to lazy soap opera dramatics in telling the Poles’ story. The tone is set when we see Jan steal a plane in France in order to reach England: instead of being a perilous endeavour that could go wrong at any moment, it’s treated as something of a practical joke on Jan’s part. Good-natured banter ensues between the Poles while they wait to be put to good use, and only when the RAF top brass assign lucky Canadian John Kent (Gibson) to oversee their training. Rule-breaking and insubordination are the order of the day from then on, alongside skirmishes with British pilots who are brought in to be unpleasantly racist, something that’s heightened by Phyllis dumping her usual man (Alexander) in favour of Jan. It’s history perhaps, but played out in a distant, modern fashion that doesn’t suit the period.

While the movie does get darker as the war continues – and the Polish body count rises – we see flashbacks to the fates of Jan and Witold’s spouses at the hands of the Nazis. This sobering of the narrative is necessary but feels underwhelming; there’s always another soap opera moment waiting just around the corner, such as when Jan seeks to repay the hospitality of a working class family, only to find their home has been destroyed in a bombing raid (the inference is clear but Jan never actually checks to see if they’re dead or alive). Elsewhere, there’s a member of the squadron suffering from cowardice, plenty of stiff upper lip moments, and the strange sight of a book on Rudimentary Polish that’s the size of War and Peace. Thankfully the aerial dogfights rescue the movie from its self-inflicted doldrums, though the anonymity of the pilots in these sequences (despite as many cockpit close ups as possible), lessens the impact when one of them is killed. The cast are proficient without being asked to do too much, and TV veteran Blair does his best to cope with the few demands of Robert Ryan and Alistair Galbraith’s patchy screenplay. All in all, it’s a great story, but here it’s also one that never seems like it’s being encouraged to truly “take off”.

Rating: 5/10 – lacklustre, though enjoyable in a basic, just-go-with-the-flow kind of way, Hurricane is the kind of movie that doesn’t even tell you its title is the make of plane its main characters are flying; without the requisite energy needed to make it as compelling as it should have been, the movie founders under a weight of good intentions and unrealised ambitions, something that can’t be said of its Polish pilots in real life – dzięki Bogu.

Overlord (2018)

05 Monday Nov 2018

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D: Julius Avery / 109m

Cast: Jovan Adepo, Wyatt Russell, Pilou Asbæk, Mathilde Ollivier, John Magaro, Iain De Caestecker, Jacob Anderson, Dominic Applewhite, Gianny Taufer, Bokeem Woodbine

The night of 5 June 1944: a squad of paratroopers have been tasked with destroying a radio mast located in the tower of a church in a small Normandy village. When their plane is shot down before they can reach the drop zone, the survivors band together in order to complete their mission. Under the command of Corporal Ford (Russell), a demolitions expert, Privates Boyce (Adepo), Tibbet (Magaro), and Chase (De Caestecker), reach the outskirts of the village, where they encounter Chloe (Ollivier). Distrustful of them at first, Chloe agrees to help them once she realises what their mission is. But there’s a problem: the church has become part of a Nazi compound, and is heavily guarded. It soon becomes clear that there’s something strange going on in the compound, something that has seen the Nazis – under the command of Wafner (Asbæk) – abduct many of the villagers, who haven’t been seen again. A visit by Wafner to Chloe’s home, and Boyce unexpectedly finding himself inside the compound, ensures the mission becomes about more than just blowing up a radio mast…

Though the above synopsis is light on detail – and deliberately so – what you can gauge from the trailer for Overlord is that this is pretty much a big budget version of all those Outpost movies we’ve been “treated” to over the last ten years; it also bears a strong resemblance to Frankenstein’s Army (2013). Whatever the inspiration for its making, though, the key question is: is it any better than those movies? Fortunately, the answer is yes. However, the script – by Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith – doesn’t push the basic storyline in any new directions, and runs out of dramatic steam once Boyce gets in and out of the compound with remarkable ease. From then on, the material plays out in entirely familiar fashion, and regular viewers of this kind of thing will be able to predict each narrative development with a minimum of effort. The characters are broadly drawn too, with Boyce at first showing fear at every turn before displaying true bravery (as we know he will), Ford the taciturn brute, Tibbet the mouthy sharpshooter, Chloe the plucky heroine, and Wafner the smarmy villain who gets a taste of his own medicine (literally). Sometimes these stereotypes can be reassuring, but here they stop the audience from engaging with anyone. Instead, they and the viewer, are stuck with going through the appropriate (e)motions.

The movie is loud and violent and glaringly obtuse at times, though punctuated by odd moments of quiet where the script attempts to provide some depth to the characters, even though it’s already too late. Avery, who provided his first feature, Son of a Gun (2014), with a rough around the edges energy that suited the material, here finds himself constrained by the demands of both the material and the requirements of making a more mainstream movie. The cast do what they can, but there’s no challenge to any of the roles, and Asbæk opts to portray Wafner as a pantomime villain almost from the off. Along the way, there’s some good practical effects work (though none of it is as shocking as might be hoped for), and one scene where a paratrooper – and then everyone else – gets a nasty “wake up” call, is splendidly staged and proves to be the movie’s highlight. But all in all it’s the movie’s lack of inventiveness that stops it from being as successful as its makers would have hoped, and which robs of it any appreciable thrills and spills.

Rating: 6/10 – despite being better than its low budget rivals, Overlord still falls into the same traps as those movies, and proves to be a modest diversion at best; once again we’re confronted with a mainstream horror movie that falls way short of its aims, and which serves as a reminder that money can’t buy everything.

The Catcher Was a Spy (2018)

21 Saturday Jul 2018

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D: Ben Lewin / 95m

Cast: Paul Rudd, Mark Strong, Sienna Miller, Jeff Daniels, Tom Wilkinson, Guy Pearce, Paul Giamatti, Giancarlo Giannini, Hiroyuki Sanada, Connie Nielsen, Shea Whigham

In the years before the US enters World War II, Morris “Moe” Berg (Rudd) is a catcher for the Boston Red Sox. Regarded as the “strangest man ever to play baseball”, Berg is an average player, but of above average intelligence, being able to speak seven languages fluently, regularly contribute to the radio quiz programme Information, Please, and read and digest up to ten newspapers daily. A man of singular interests but also leading a very private life, Berg pursues a relationship with a woman, Estella (Miller), that he won’t acknowledge publicly, while on a trip to Japan, he takes it on himself to shoot footage of the Tokyo harbour. After Pearl Harbor, Berg uses the same footage to wangle himself a desk job with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Soon though, his expertise in languages lands him a job in the field: to track down the noted physicist Werner Heisenberg (Strong) and determine if his work for the Nazis will give them a nuclear weapon – and if it will, then Berg is to kill him…

Another tale of unsung heroics set during World War II, The Catcher Was a Spy (a title that’s both derivative and clever) is a movie that takes a real life person and spins a mostly true story out of events they took part in, but does so in a way that alerts the viewer very early on that, despite the mission, Berg won’t be put in any danger, so any tension will evaporate before it’s even got up a head of steam. So instead of a movie that should be increasingly tense and dramatic, we have a movie that plays matter-of-factly with the material, and is presented in a pedestrian, if sure-footed manner. Working from an adaptation of the book of the same name by Nicholas Dawidoff, director Ben Lewin and writer Robert Rodat have fashioned a moderately engaging espionage tale that moves elegantly yet far from robustly from scene to scene without providing much in the way of emotional impact. Partly this is due to Berg’s own nature, his muted feelings and intellectual prowess being ostensibly the whole man, and while the movie and Rudd’s performance adhere to Berg’s character, it leaves the viewer in the awkward position of being an observer and not a participant.

With Berg introduced “as is”, and with only the most minimal of character arcs to send him on, the movie soon becomes a wearying succession of exposition scenes, or opportunities to show off Berg’s gift for languages (which Rudd copies with aplomb). The early scenes with Estella show Berg trying to be “normal” but not quite knowing how to, give way to the mission to find Heisenberg, but the movie’s switch from domestic tribulations to wartime emergency – Berg literally has Heisenberg’s life, and possibly the fate of the world in his hands – dovetail at the same pace and with the same lack of urgency. Even a sequence where Berg, accompanied by military man Robert Furman (Pearce) and friendly physicist Samuel Goudsmit (Giamatti), try to thread their way through a town overrun by Germans lacks the necessary sense of imminent peril needed to make it work. Another issue is Andrij Parekh’s humdrum cinematography, which deadens the effect of Luciana Arrighi’s murky yet effective production design. Against all this, Rudd is a good choice for the enigmatic Berg, and the moments where he expresses Berg’s self-doubts, offer a rare glimpse of the man behind the façade. But, sadly, these moments aren’t plentiful enough to offset the flaws that dog the rest of the movie, and which keep it from being far more impressive than it is.

Rating: 5/10 – proficient enough without providing much more than the basics of Berg’s life as a catcher or an OSS man, The Catcher Was a Spy isn’t dull per se, just not as compelling as it could (or should) have been; Rudd aside, a quality cast is left with little to do except recite their lines in a competent manner, and any notions of political or intellectual morality are left undeveloped or overlooked.

Zoo (2017)

24 Sunday Jun 2018

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D: Colin McIvor / 97m

Cast: Art Parkinson, Toby Jones, Penelope Wilton, Emily Flain, Ian O’Reilly, Amy Huberman, Damian O’Hare, Stephen Hagan, James Stockdale, Ian McElhinney, Glen Nee

It’s 1941, and there’s a new arrival at Belfast Zoo: a baby elephant that zookeeper’s son, Tom Hall (Parkinson), names ‘Buster’. Tom’s father, George (O’Hare), is in charge of looking after Buster, and Tom visits him every day, even when the zoo is closed – and much to the chagrin of gatekeeper and security guard, Charlie (Jones). But George is enlisted in the Army and goes off to fight in the war. Soon, the first of several air raids carried out by the Germans persuades the Ministry of Public Security to order the killing of the zoo’s dangerous animals, in case any escape during any further air raids. Buster is spared on this occasion, but it’s made clear to Tom that he may not be so lucky in the future. Determined to keep Buster safe from the authorities, and obtaining help from fellow classmates Jane (Flain) and Pete (O’Reilly), Tom hatches a plan to move Buster from the zoo and into hiding. Circumstances ensure that his plan doesn’t go entirely as hoped, but the unexpected assistance of local widow (and animal lover) Mrs Austin (Wilton), allows Buster to remain hidden, until a reward is offered for his whereabouts…

Though based on a true story, Zoo plays fast and loose with what really happened, but thankfully does so in a way that retains the spirit of the actual events. In doing so, the script – by writer/director McIvor – often runs the risk of making things appear too whimsical and too fantastical (Buster isn’t the quietest of baby elephants, but none of Mrs Austin’s neighbours seem to notice or recognise when he makes a racket). But this is a kids’ movie at heart, replete with pre-teen protagonists and a reassuring approach to the story that says, “don’t worry, the elephant will be fine”. That’s not to say that there aren’t problems to be overcome along the way, from the nasty intentions of school bully, Vernon (Nee), to the random searches of two local air raid wardens, and Buster’s need for a special medicine kept at the zoo. Through it all, the war serves as a backdrop that emphasises the seriousness of Buster’s situation, and the risks being taken to keep him safe and well. Children of a certain age will be enthralled by it, though adults – well, that might be a different matter.

Still, the movie is very likeable, though at times (and particularly once Buster has been “emancipated”), it does rely a little too heavily on getting Tom and his friends out of trouble just as quickly as they get into it. And despite the adults starting off as Tom and friends’ main adversaries, it isn’t long before each of them falls into place, and McIvor can end the movie on an emotional high note. Again, this isn’t a bad way for the movie to play out, and though it is incredibly predictable, the quality of the performances and the tender sincerity of how it’s all rendered more than make up for any deficiencies in McIvor’s storytelling. Parkinson is an endearing presence as Tom, while Flain plays Jane with a reserve borne out of her character’s unhappy home life. As Pete, O’Reilly is the movie’s comic relief, though he’s matched by Stockdale as Pete’s younger, disabled brother, Mickey (his “elephant” impression is terrific). Of the adults, Jones is underused along with most everyone else, leaving it to Wilton to make an impression as the real life “Elephant Angel“, Denise Austin (seen below with real life Buster, Sheila).

Rating: 7/10 – charming, funny, and darkly dramatic on occasion, Zoo takes one of those interesting footnotes history provides us with from time to time, and makes a pleasing slice of entertainment from it; the period detail is impeccable, the use of a real elephant (called Nellie – of course) avoids the deployment of any unintentionally lifeless CGI, and thanks to Mcivor’s tight grip on the movie’s tone, keeps sentimentality and mawkishness to a minimum.

Monthly Roundup – March 2018

31 Saturday Mar 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original title: In the Absence of Good Men

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10 Reasons to Remember Lewis Gilbert (1920-2018)

27 Tuesday Feb 2018

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Lewis Gilbert (6 March 1920 – 23 February 2018)

With his family’s music hall background (Gilbert first appeared on stage with them aged five), and a handful of movie roles as a child in the Thirties (mostly uncredited), it would have seemed appropriate for Lewis Gilbert to seek a career in front of the camera, but though Alexander Korda offered to send him to RADA, Gilbert elected to study direction instead. The first movie he worked on as an assistant? Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn (1939). Not a bad start, but with the onset of World War II, Gilbert joined the Royal Air Force’s film unit and worked on several wartime documentaries. Further experience came when he was seconded to the First Motion Picture Unit of the US Army Air Forces, where he was allowed to shoot much of the work assigned to American director William Keighley.

After the war, Gilbert continued to make documentaries, but it was in the Fifties that he began to make his mark as a director of features. Working for low-budget outfits such as Nettlefold Films, Gilbert honed his craft, and made a number of well received movies that brought him greater attention and the chance to work on a succession of true stories from the recent war. For a while, Gilbert was the go-to director for these kinds of movies, and between 1953 and 1962 he made half a dozen war-related movies, all of which increased his standing within the movie community, and allowed him to make a range of other movies during the same period that highlighted his versatility. But it was Alfie (1966) that really put him on the map, earning him his sole Academy Award nomination, and proving once and for all that his strongest suit was in relationship dramas.

Anyone following his career up until this point, would have been surprised when his next movie proved to be the fifth Bond movie, You Only Live Twice (1967). But Gilbert proved himself to be at home amidst all the over-sized sets and the absurdity of a Bond movie, and returned twice more to make The Spy Who Loved Me (1977 – terrific) and Moonraker (1979 – uh-oh). In between his first and second Bonds, Gilbert made a number of movies that didn’t fare so well with critics or audiences, and with some, like The Adventurers (1970), Gilbert would later claim that they shouldn’t have been made. But after his Roger Moore one-two at the end of the Seventies, the Eighties saw Gilbert make two bona fide British classics in Educating Rita (1983) and Shirley Valentine (1989). He made his last movie, the enjoyable but slight Before You Go in 2002, but at eighty-two, retirement wasn’t exactly a surprise.

If he had one regret, it was always that he was unable to direct Oliver! (1968), a movie he had developed with its composer, Lionel Bart, but which he was unable to make due to contractual obligations. Gilbert was a director who, Bond movies aside, always looked to the characters first, and it was this focus that allowed him to make so many wonderful movies over more than fifty years. He was honest about his work, and some of his collaborators, but always tried to do the best he could do with the material provided. He wasn’t an auteur in the accepted sense, but his ability to draw out excellent performances from his casts, and to move easily between comedy and drama – often in the same scene in a movie – was a constant throughout his career. And he was a realist. Of Alfie, he had this to say: “Paramount backed Alfie because it was going to be made for $500,000, normally the sort of money spent on executives’ cigar bills.”

1 – Time, Gentlemen, Please! (1952)

2 – Reach for the Sky (1956)

3 – The Admirable Crichton (1957)

4 – Carve Her Name With Pride (1958)

5 – Sink the Bismarck! (1960)

6 – Alfie (1966)

7 – You Only Live Twice (1967)

8 – The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

9 – Educating Rita (1983)

10 – Shirley Valentine (1989)

HHhH (2017)

12 Monday Feb 2018

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aka Killing Heydrich; The Man With the Iron Heart

D: Cédric Jimenez / 120m

Cast: Jason Clarke, Rosamund Pike, Jack O’Connell, Jack Reynor, Mia Wasikowska, Stephen Graham, Thomas M. Wright, Noah Jupe, Geoff Bell, Enzo Cilenti, Volker Bruch, David Rintoul, David Horovitch, Abigail Lawrie, Adam Nagaitis

Let’s get this out of the way right from the start: HHhH is an odd movie. In fact, it’s very odd. Not because of the title, which is an acronym for Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich (Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich, a quip you wouldn’t dare repeat back then), and not because you have to wade through a long list of actors before you find someone whose first language is actually German or Czechoslovakian. No, what makes the movie so odd is that, for a drama based around the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich (Clarke), keen violinist and one of the main architects of the Final Solution, it lacks ambition and drive, and often moves from scene to scene as if seeking the right direction in which to move forward. It also lacks focus, telling us much about Heydrich’s early life in its first twenty minutes (including his love of fencing, and his dishonourable discharge from the German Navy), but then failing to link it all to anything that happens once he’s fully committed to being a Nazi.

Like a lot of members of the Nazi Party, Heydrich went from being something of a nobody to somebody wielding quite a lot of power in a very short space of time, and the movie recognises this. However, thanks to the vagaries of the script, and Clarke’s gloomy demeanour throughout, Heydrich remains a sadistic bully boy in adult’s clothing – and just that. No one is looking for the movie to redeem Heydrich in some way (though that would make it more interesting), but for all its attempts at trying to shine a spotlight on his pre-Nazi activities, they’re all left abandoned as the movie progresses. Instead we see Heydrich’s rise to prominence through the patronage of, first, his wife, Lina von Osten (Pike playing Lady Macbeth as if her career depends upon it), and then, second, Heinrich Himmler (Graham playing Hitler’s right hand man as the uncle you do visit). He does some expectedly nasty things, behaves unconscionably whenever possible, and then his story, with over an hour of the movie to go, takes a back seat to Operation Anthropoid.

By changing its focus nearly halfway through, Jimenez’s movie only narrowly avoids feeling schizophrenic. As we’re introduced to Jan Kubiš (O’Connell) and Jozef Gabčík (Reynor), the two men chosen to head up the assassination attempt, we also get to meet a whole roster of new characters that we don’t have time to get to know or care about. And once Heydrich is out of the way, the terrible reprisals carried out by the Nazis are represented by the razing of Lidice (which actually happened), but in such a brusque way that it makes it obvious that HHhH wants to move on quickly to address the fate of Kubiš and Gabčík and their compatriots – which goes on for far too long and features the kind of gung-ho heroics that only a movie would feel was appropriate. Add the fact that the script – by Jiminez, Audrey Diwan and David Farr from Laurent Binet’s novel – is represented by some of the blandest, most depressing cinematography seen in recent years, and you have a movie that is tonally awkward, flatly directed, and which flirts in earnest with having nothing meaningful to say.

Rating: 5/10 – clunky and dour, and only sporadically engaging, HHhH tells its story as if it was being forced to – and the whole process is painful; a missed opportunity would be putting it mildly, but the movie’s very oddness allows for a certain fascination to develop as the movie unfolds, making it watchable if you don’t expect too much from it.

Churchill (2017)

24 Sunday Sep 2017

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D: Jonathan Teplitzky / 105m

Cast: Brian Cox, Miranda Richardson, John Slattery, Julian Wadham, Ella Purnell, Richard Durden, James Purefoy, Danny Webb

Based on a true story. Possibly one of the worst phrases you can see appear on screen at the beginning of a movie. Based on a true story. Which means… what exactly? That the makers of the movie have taken a true story and made their own version? Well, if that’s the best definition, then the makers of Churchill have done precisely that: they’ve taken a true story, the lead-up to the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944, and woven a tale that paints Winston Churchill (Cox) as a self-aggrandising blowhard, his wife Clementine (Richardson), as a dutiful yet exasperated woman who nearly comes to leave him, and puts both of them at the centre of a turgid retelling of an event that determined the course of human history.

Winston Churchill has been portrayed on screen many, many times in the past, but always as the fearless leader who guided Great Britain through World War II, and who helped bring about the demise of Hitler and the Nazis. For the British, he was a hero, a public figure they trusted and the only man who could lead the country during those terrible times. But this version of Churchill is the tortured, reluctant hero so consumed by guilt and self-doubt that he thinks it’s a great idea for both he and King George VI (Purefoy) to sail at the forefront of the Normandy landings as a sign of commitment to their troops. This is the version of Churchill who behaves like a spoilt child who can’t get his own way, who puts his own needs ahead of the needs of his country, and who isn’t above throwing a childish tantrum when his needs aren’t met. This is Churchill deconstructed and reassembled as a potential liability. Look, the movie is saying, look how close Churchill came to ruining Great Britain’s war effort.

Except, inevitably (there’s that word again, regular readers), very, very little of it is actually true. In fact, so much of Churchill is inarguably wrong that it’s hard to work out why the movie was made, and why everyone involved thought the approach taken by screenwriter Alex von Tunzelmann was a good idea. The movie is a deliberate attempt to create a fictional drama out of a situation that doesn’t need to be rewritten at all; if the lead up to D-Day isn’t dramatic enough without all these fabrications, then someone is really missing the point. For UK audiences it should be even more galling. Not content with casting aspersions about Churchill’s character at a time when he was fully supportive of the aims and objectives of Operation Overlord, the production seeks to promote the idea that Winston and Clementine had an unhappy marriage, and that some kind of coup has taken place in the run up to D-Day, with General Eisenhower firmly in charge of the whole plan, and Churchill reduced to sitting belligerently on the sidelines voicing concerns he didn’t have.

In order to provide some kind of psychological grounding for Churchill’s misgivings, the script refers repeatedly to the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, which in this version he tried hard to stop (when in fact, he was very much in favour of it, and even recommended sending obsolete warships against the superior German fleet). Cue blood-tinged tides and Churchill looking sad. But it never rings true as a reason for Churchill’s behaviour within the movie itself, and despite a tremendous amount of effort by the script to convince us otherwise, it’s an argument that falls flat every time it’s mentioned. It’s as if everyone around him – including the viewer – can see the necessity of the Normandy landings, but somehow, this astute, politically and militarily aware man doesn’t get it at all. Can we really expect this to be the case, and does it make sense even within the parameters of von Tunzelmann’s alternate wartime reality?

Sadly, the answer is no, and what’s even sadder is that the movie limps along from one scene where Churchill abuses the people around him to another, and with all the dramatic flair of an episode of a reality TV show. Teplitzky offers several moments where melodrama creeps in uninvited, and others where the unlikelihood of what transpires is shocking, such as Field Marshal Montgomery (Wadham) calling Churchill a “bastard” to his face, or typist Helen Garrett (Purnell) putting a halt to Churchill’s doom and gloom predictions of untold slaughter on the Normandy beaches by mentioning her fiancé is on one of the ships taking part (this has a further, and even more unlikely payoff later when Churchill lets Helen know her fiancé is okay and that he “sends her his love” – all during the midst of the first wave of landings). All this makes Churchill an uneasy and unconvincing mix of psychological drama and wartime soap opera.

But if the level of fabrication is weirdly impressive, what is truly impressive is Cox’s portrayal of the man himself, which despite the implausibilities and repetitious nature of von Tunzelmann’s script, is an acting tour-de-force, one that magnifies the (perceived) insecurities and guilt-ridden anguish that propel Churchill on, and which saves the movie from being completely and irrevocably execrable. Cox has long wanted to play Churchill, and the wait has been worth it, even if the material itself isn’t worthy of, or a match for, his performance. He’s ably and effectively supported by Richardson who also transcends the material with her performance as the (perceived) long-suffering Clementine Churchill, the character’s exasperation at her husband’s antics something that the viewer can appreciate entirely. But two performances, even ones as good as these, can’t stop Churchill from being a facetious way to treat a story that could have been told as it happened, and far more credibly.

Rating: 3/10 – based on a true story which here means let’s make a movie that distorts the truth (which is ironic coming from the author of Reel History: The World According to the Movies), Churchill is factually inaccurate, often insipid, slackly directed, and lacks any appreciable depth for viewers to latch onto; Cox and Richardson save the movie from being a complete disaster, and there’s reason to congratulate David Higgs for his sterling cinematography, but otherwise this is one for history buffs to avoid, and for non-history buffs to take with a huge pinch of salt.

Dunkirk (2017)

03 Thursday Aug 2017

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D: Christopher Nolan / 106m

Cast: Fionn Whitehead, Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy, Tom Glynn-Carney, Barry Keoghan, Aneurin Barnard, Harry Styles, Jack Lowden, James D’Arcy

NOTE: This review is based on an IMAX screening of the movie.

At one point during Christopher Nolan’s visually and sonically impressive ode to British heroism, Mark Rylance’s stoic Mr Dawson says, “Men my age dictate this war. Why should we be allowed to send our children to fight it?” It’s a rare moment of unexpected criticism (of the war) in a movie that celebrates the British determination to rescue victory from the jaws of defeat on the beaches at Dunquerke (through Operation Dynamo), and which does so in spectacular style. It’s one of a number of awkward moments where Nolan the writer appears to realise that he needs to be a commentator as well as an observer of events, and that he needs to add some much needed depth to proceedings. It’s also a moment that’s indicative of a greater problem with the movie as a whole: it doesn’t engage with the audience as much as it should do.

Nolan has gone on record to say that his idea for Dunkirk wasn’t to make a war movie but to make a suspense thriller, to take the three strands of land, sea and air and amalgamate them by the end of the movie into one combined incident. It’s typical of Nolan’s fondness for non-linear narratives, and he orchestrates the three different time frames – land: one week, sea: one day, air: one hour – with great skill and ingenuity, but amidst all the technical wizardry, the human element is left just as stranded as the Allied troops were back in 1940. Considering the scale of the evacuation, it’s hard to understand why Nolan decided to leave out such a crucial aspect. Thanks to the narrative decisions he’s made, the characters we do meet rarely make an impact, with patronym Tommy (Whitehead) suffering the most. Right from the start, where we see him fleeing from a barrage of gunfire and his comrades dropping like flies around him, and through all the travails he endures along the way, he’s a character we never fully identify or sympathise with. He’s a cypher in uniform, and Nolan never really introduces us to him.

The same goes for Hardy as RAF pilot Farrier. Once more hidden behind a mask that obscures his lower face, Hardy’s expression barely changes from scene to scene; he either looks determined or very determined. Alas, this isn’t enough to provide audiences with a character to identify with or relate to, and it’s only his heroic manner (which is shared by all but one other character) that allows us to appreciate him. Of all the characters we meet, only Rylance as the quietly resolute Mr Dawson and Branagh as Commander Bolton, overseer of the evacuation at Dunquerke itself, make much of an impact but that’s entirely due to their skill and experience as actors. It’s a shame that Nolan couldn’t have fleshed out his characters more; what’s the point of employing actors of the calibre of Murphy and Hardy when you’re not going to give them much to do?

For a movie maker of Nolan’s stature, this is an unfortunate approach, and it leaves the movie in danger of becoming just an empty spectacle. Nolan has put a lot of time and effort into ensuring his take on the evacuation is as realistically mounted as possible, with a minimal use of CGI and the majority of practical effects being done in camera, and shooting on the very same beaches at Dunquerke. Thankfully this verisimilitude pays off handsomely, with Nolan’s standing as one of the most technically and visually gifted directors of his generation confirmed for all to see. There’s no room for doubt: Dunkirk is a stunning visual experience. Nolan wanted to give audiences the most immersive movie experience possible (albeit in the IMAX format) and he’s succeeded magnificently. Whether it’s on the beach, on the water, or in the air, Nolan, along with DoP Hoyte Van Hoytema, ensures that the viewer is thrust into the thick of things, whether it’s amongst a group of soldiers hemmed in on a jetty while German Stukas strafe them, or Tommy and some of his fellow soldiers stuck below decks in a torpedoed ship, or the cockpit of Farrier’s Spitfire, all these scenes and many more have an immediacy and a visceral intensity that is breathtaking to watch. On these occasions, the movie truly is an immersive experience, and Nolan’s ambition is fully realised.

But if Dunkirk looks visually astonishing, then it’s surpassed by its sound design. Every rifle shot and bullet hit, every creak and warp of timber on the boats, every burst and spin of the fighter planes is delivered with such clarity and impact that it adds an extra layer to the immersive nature of the material, and in IMAX 6-track format it’s even more impressive. There are details in the mix that are remarkably subtle as well, such as the different engine sounds of the small ships as they approach Dunquerke, or the trudge of footsteps across the beach. This is attention to detail taken to an almost obsessive degree, and the movie is all the better for it, creating a soundscape that highlights and dominates events shown, and which in terms of fidelity, sets a new benchmark.

Ultimately though (and a little unfortunately), what Nolan has devised and created is a movie that offers an unparalleled viewing and listening experience but which has moments where it seems to be saying, “look at this, isn’t that spectacular?” You can almost imagine a reporter turning to a newsreel cameraman and asking, a la Die Hard (1988), “Tell me you got that.” Nolan can perhaps be forgiven for a little grandstanding, or a little showing off from time to time, but when these moments occur they have the effect of taking the viewer out of the movie and reminding them that what they’re watching isn’t always as immersive as planned. What’s also distracting at times is Hans Zimmer’s score for the movie, which uses Nolan’s own pocket watch as a musical template for much of the tension that’s generated, though it’s a motif that’s over-used. It’s a divisive score, hugely effective on some occasions, an unfortunate pall over proceedings at others, but at least Zimmer stops short of making it all too triumphant and imperialistic – and that adds to the overall effect tremendously.

Rating: 7/10 – aside from some questionable narrative decisions, and restrictions around getting to know the characters, Dunkirk is the year’s most ambitious, and most mature, summer blockbuster; an incredible technical achievement by Nolan, the movie is a visual and aural tour-de-force, a feat of movie making that’s unlikely to be equalled or bettered any time in the near future, and which may well be Nolan’s best movie so far… oh, hang on, no, that’s still The Dark Knight (2008).

Shock Waves (1977)

31 Monday Jul 2017

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aka Almost Human

D: Ken Wiederhorn / 85m

Cast: Peter Cushing, Brooke Adams, Luke Halpin, Fred Buch, Jack Davidson, D.J. Sidney, Don Stout, John Carradine

Horror movies in the Seventies went through a kind of sea change. By the middle of the decade, Hammer were on their last legs having exhausted their Dracula and Frankenstein franchises, and the big Hollywood studios had yet to embrace the genre as fully as they could have, content to leave it to low budget production companies such as Amicus and Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. In Europe, horror movies were more concerned with providing sleaze than monsters, and further afield there were sporadic releases that rarely made an impact beyond their own borders. Zombie movies were still few and far between despite the success of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), and movies where the protagonists were zombie Nazis were even rarer, with only The Frozen Dead (1966) predating the eerie chills of Shock Waves.

The movie begins in typical fashion, with a group of strangers on a chartered boat that’s seen better days, just like its crusty old captain, Ben (Carradine). The rest of his crew amounts to Keith (Halpin), who seems to be there just to steer the boat, and Dobbs (Stout), the booze-living galley hand. The passengers are a mixed bunch as well, consisting of middle-aged couple Norman and Beverly (Davidson, Sidney), and younger couple Chuck and Rose (Buch, Adams). Norman is already complaining about the age of the boat and the cost of the trip, but when the sky turns crimson and the boat’s instruments don’t respond, he really has something to complain about. An night-time encounter with a mysterious freighter leads to the boat needing repairs, but in the morning, Ben has disappeared. Believing he’s headed towards a nearby island, everyone gets in a dinghy and heads for shore. They find Ben but he’s dead. They also find a hotel, long abandoned – or so they think. Instead they find themselves challenged by a German-sounding stranger (Cushing).

The stranger insists they leave immediately, and tells them of a boat they can use to get off the island. In the meantime, Dobbs is killed, and his body discovered by Rose. Seeking answers, the group confront the stranger, who tells them of a secret experiment that the Nazis carried out during World War II, an experiment to create a ruthless super-soldier. The result was a soldier not living and not dead, and too difficult to control. When the war ended, the stranger, an SS Commander, was charged with disposing of the super-soldiers under his command, and so he sunk their ship. But now they have returned, and will continue to kill everyone they encounter. As far as getting off the island is concerned, avoiding the Death Corps will be difficult enough, but as fear and terror take hold, those who remain alive begin to fight amongst themselves…

If it’s a gore-soaked, ripped-out entrails kind of zombie movie that you’re after, then be warned: Shock Waves is not the movie for you. In fact, this is possibly the first and only post-1968 zombie movie where not even a single drop of blood is spilt. Instead, director Wiederhorn (making his first feature), and co-writer John Kent Harrison concentrate on creating an unnerving, atmospheric chiller-thriller that does its best to be macabre rather than gory, and which largely succeeds in its aim. There’s something to be said for any horror movie that eschews blood and gore in its efforts to make viewers feel unnerved and uncomfortable, and though the movie suffers due to genre-standard scenes where the characters run from place to place without actually getting anywhere, the scenes that involve the implacable zombie Nazis have a certain frisson about them. At one point they emerge from the surf, one by one, and stand as if waiting for a signal only they can hear; it’s genuinely creepy.

Wiederhorn is to be congratulated on being so constrained, and relying on menace and a febrile atmosphere to accentuate the occasional shocks. He’s helped by the choice of location, which isn’t an island at all, but several sites in Florida, including an area of swampland that the characters are forced to take flight and stumble through time and again as they try and escape, but though all that running about quite aimlessly seems to be just a way of padding out the running time, like all swampland, it has an unpleasant, threatening vibe that slowly makes itself felt the longer everyone crashes around it. Wiederhorn and DoP Reuben Trane do well to create such a hostile, potentially deadly environment… and that’s without the zombies. Also, there are times, notably at the beginning when the sky turns red, that the movie feels like it’s heading into full-on Twilight Zone territory, and these moments add to the growing sense of unease that the movie promotes in its opening half hour.

But while there’s plenty of effective atmosphere to be had, the movie is less successful when it comes to its motley crew of characters. Cushing and Carradine are old hands at this sort of thing and manage their roles accordingly, while Adams, in her first leading role, has little to do but pose or swim in a bikini. Ex-Flipper star Halpin fares better as the nominal hero, but everyone else is saddled with the usual horror stereotypes: the long-suffering wife, the outwardly macho/inwardly cowardly adult jock, the self-important malcontent, and the booze-fuelled worrier. Once Ben is killed off the script disposes of the rest of the characters in predictable fashion (and order), without once attempting to make them more relatable. This, however, shouldn’t be much of a surprise, as creating likeable characters never seems to be a priority in horror movies, and Shock Waves is no different. But what is notable about it is that in the context of when it was released, it dared to be different in its approach and with its “monsters”. Many more zombie Nazi movies have followed in the years since, and some can be considered better movies overall, but with apologies to The Frozen Dead, this is the grandaddy of them all, and still as diverting and sinister as it was forty years ago.

Rating: 6/10 – if you can put aside the genre conventions and occasional dumb-ass decision-making, Shock Waves is a grim, intense horror movie that makes good use of its “bad guys” and has a palpable sense of disquiet about it; still more of a curio than a cult movie, it’s better than it looks but is hamstrung by poor production values and some very choppy editing. (29/31)

Whisky Galore! (2016)

22 Monday May 2017

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D: Gillies MacKinnon / 98m

Cast: Gregor Fisher, Eddie Izzard, Sean Biggerstaff, Kevin Guthrie, Ellie Kendrick, Naomi Battrick, Michael Nardone, James Cosmo, Fenella Woolgar, Brian Pettifer, Iain Robertson, Anne Louise Ross

During World War II, on the remote Scottish island of Todday, a terrible thing happens to the residents: they run out of whisky. With rationing in force, and the chances of the island being resupplied looking far from likely, the inhabitants – well, mostly the men – soon fall into despair. Forced to make do with tea, their spirits appear broken, with even the arrival home of Sergeant Odd (Biggerstaff), and the prospect of a wedding between postmaster’s daughter Catriona Macroon (Kendrick) and teacher George Campbell (Guthrie), failing to interest them.

Salvation arrives in the form of an unexpected shipwreck, when the SS Cabinet runs aground a short way from shore. The crew manage to get off the stranded vessel and head for Todday; as they do so, they let on to some of the islanders who have come out to help them, that their cargo included fifty thousand cases of whisky bound for America. News of this windfall reaches the rest of the island and plans are put in motion immediately to recover as many cases as possible before the ship sinks for good. But the small matter of it being the Sabbath day means the islanders have to wait twenty-four hours before they can put their rescue plan into operation.

During this time, Catriona’s sister, Peggy (Battrick) renews her acquaintance with Sergeant Odd and romance quickly blossoms; her father learns that the SS Cabinet was carrying other valuable cargo that must be retrieved; Home Guard leader, Captain Waggett (Izzard), determines that he should prevent any looting; and George Campbell does battle with his strict Calvinist mother (Ross) over her refusal to acknowledge his impending marriage to Catriona. And a mysterious man called Brown (Nardone) takes an interest in the wreck that arouses suspicion of his motives for being on the island. The whisky is saved (and with it the island), and all that remains is for the islanders to find as many hiding places as they can for it, while Captain Waggett makes it his personal mission to find those many hiding places and confiscate all the whisky…

The first reaction upon hearing that someone has gone ahead and produced a remake of a movie that is a bona fide classic – and a bona fide Ealing classic at that – may well be one of complete and utter disbelief. Such news may also provoke feelings of horror and revulsion; after all these years (and the original was released in 1949), to do so may well be thought of as tantamount to sacrilege, or at the very least, just plain unnecessary. The Coen brothers tried the same thing with their version of The Ladykillers (2004), and now it’s generally regarded as one of their poorer efforts. But at least that remake had a touch of the bizarre about it, a sensibility that was far removed from that of Ealing Studios when they made the 1955 original. Here, there’s nothing out of the ordinary to make the movie stand out, and despite the makers’ intention to make a “modern interpretation” of Alexander Mackendrick’s masterful comedy, they hew too closely to the style of the original for that to be true.

What this all amounts to is a movie that is a pale shadow of its former incarnation, and a project that should have remained in the development hell that it was rescued from a few years ago. In the hands of director MacKinnon and screenwriter Peter McDougall, this “modern interpretation” lacks all the requisite energy needed to engage with an audience, and much like last year’s other reboot of an English comedy classic, the execrable Dad’s Army, fails at the one thing it should be doing above all else: making its audience laugh. Like the island without its whisky, the movie is a dry, barren experience where the most that any unlucky and/or unprepared viewer can hope for is a wry smile or a short chuckle. The humour should be built into the storyline, but you have to search long and hard for it, and after a while the feeling takes hold that you’re searching in vain.

It’s a strange realisation to make. It’s not as if the cast isn’t already well versed in the art of making people laugh. Fisher is better known as Rab C. Nesbitt, the alcoholic Glaswegian and self-confessed “sensitive big bastard”. But as Macroon the island postmaster, Fisher is restrained by a role that requires him to be avuncular and quietly persevering, while all around him get to explore a wider range of emotions and character arcs. It’s as if the producers’ cast him in the role without any real appreciation of his skills as a comic actor. Instead of being at the fore, he’s too often reduced to playing second fiddle or fading into the background. And then there’s Eddie Izzard, a comedian who can take the most mundane of topics and reduce audiences to tears with his inspired musings on said topics. But if you didn’t know about his career, and how good he is as a stand-up comedian, then seeing Izzard in this would prompt most people to ask, what’s so special about him? And they would be right, because in this, Izzard just isn’t funny. Instead he’s set adrift in a sea of humdrum material and there’s no sign of land to spur him on.

In the end it’s McDougall’s bland, pedestrian script that lets him down, allied with MacKinnon’s inability to instill any energy into the proceedings. This leaves Whisky Galore! relying unhealthily on some unexpected delights, chief of which is Fenella Woolgar’s terrific performance as Captain Waggett’s wife, Dolly. Dolly is a woman whose understanding of the islanders exceeds her husband’s, and who offers up the kind of observations that only someone who retreats often into her own world could come up with. But alas, Woolgar isn’t on screen very often, and the movie plods along in neutral for much of its running time, so much so that it becomes an endurance exercise: can you make it to the end without losing the will to watch? It’s a close one, but this really isn’t a movie to start watching when you’re really tired and sleep is the better option.

Perhaps remakes shouldn’t be attempted unless something really new or different can be brought to the project, something that’s able to stop audiences from reflecting on the strengths of an older, more well regarded movie and judging the newer version accordingly. However, this definitely isn’t one of those occasions, and though there’s a clear improvement afforded by seeing some truly beautiful Scottish scenery in colour, it’s not enough to overcome the movie’s deficiencies in pretty much every other department. When the movie you’re remaking is an acknowledged classic, and you don’t employ your A-game, then this is the likely result: a movie that could stand as the dictionary definition of tedious.

Rating: 3/10 – whatever ambitions its makers had for it, Whisky Galore! lacks the wherewithal to achieve them, and the entire cast (bar the delightful Woolgar) look as if they’d rather be doing anything else, anywhere else; woeful in the way that only modern British comedies can be, this is a remake that serves no other purpose than to remind viewers just how good the 1949 version is.

Their Finest (2016)

04 Thursday May 2017

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D: Lone Scherfig / 117m

Cast: Gemma Arterton, Sam Claflin, Bill Nighy, Jack Huston, Paul Ritter, Rachael Stirling, Richard E. Grant, Henry Goodman, Jake Lacy, Jeremy Irons, Eddie Marsan, Helen McCrory

Britain, the summer of 1940. Since the outbreak of World War II, the British Ministry of Information has been making short information movies to be shown at cinemas. Its film department – headed up by Roger Swain (Grant) – takes on a young Welsh woman called Catrin Cole (Arterton) to act as a screenwriter, and in particular, to write better dialogue for any female characters (the other screenwriters are, unsurprisingly, all male). Catrin settles in, and finds herself working alongside Tom Buckley (Claflin) and Raymond Parfitt (Ritter), and under the stewardship of Phyl Moore (Stirling). Catrin soon earns a degree of respect from Buckley, who is nominally more experienced, and her work begins to gain recognition. But at home, it’s not quite the same. Catrin’s husband, Ellis (Huston), is a struggling artist whose bleak reflections on the War aren’t attracting any attention. He’s pleased that she’s doing well in her own job, but is inwardly jealous at the same time.

The film department is charged with making a full-length feature. Catrin is given the task of talking to twin sisters who took out their father’s boat and sailed across to Dunkirk to help in the evacuation. But she soon discovers that the boat developed engine trouble five miles out and they never even got to Dunkirk, let alone rescued anyone. Undeterred, Catrin returns to the Ministry and tells a fictional version of the twins’ story – and one that is believed by everyone except Tom. He keeps quiet, and the project is given the go-ahead. Catrin, Tom and Raymond all work on the script, while the casting goes ahead. Pompous actor Ambrose Hilliard (Nighy) is approached through his agent, Sammy Smith (Marsan), but turns down the supporting role of drunken Uncle Frank out of misplaced pride. Tragedy strikes, however, and Hilliard takes on the role thanks to pressure from Sammy’s sister, Sophie (McCrory).

The truth about the twins’ rescue mission is discovered, and though the Ministry has been determined to make a movie out of an act of real life heroism, Catrin convinces everyone to make a fictional version. Production begins on location in Devon, but the unexpected intervention of the Secretary of War (Irons) means that the script will now have to accommodate the presence of an American soldier in its plot, and specifically, Eagle Squadron pilot (and non-actor) Carl Lundberg (Lacy). Catrin persuades Hilliard to tutor Lundberg, while she and Tom grow closer. As the shoot progresses, their relationship develops to the point where surprising information volunteered by Catrin herself promises a sea change in her relationships with both Ellis and Tom.

Adapted from the novel, Their Finest Hour and a Half by Lissa Evans, this awkwardly titled movie is the kind of heritage picture that the British do so well. From the moment Catrin steps out onto a Blitz-torn street we’re in oh-so familiar territory, with just enough artfully stylised devastation to provide the viewer with a visual shorthand as to the time and place they’re witnessing. In a way it’s comforting, seeing all these bomb blasted buildings with their scattered debris, and as Arterton’s plucky Welsh screenwriter-to-be makes her way to the Ministry of Information, there’s a sense that whatever happens in Their Finest, it will retain the opening’s carefully constructed sense of artificiality, and avoid any “difficult” or “realistic” moments.

And so it proves. The movie ticks all the boxes for a nicely balanced period feature, with Catrin filling the role of innocent abroad, Tom as the adversary-cum-mentor figure that she’ll inevitably fall in love with, Hilliard as the curmudgeonly actor who’s on grudging terms with humility, and a variety of supporting characters who pop up every now and again, contribute a further variety of notable moments or dialogue (“He is an actor. Unless you have reviewed him, had intercourse with him, or done both simultaneously, he won’t remember you.”), and then fade back into the background until needed again. There’s the requisite number of apparently insurmountable problems that are resolved in under a minute flat, bickering and misunderstandings between the romantic leads, obvious references to the sexism of the times, Richard E. Grant pulling faces whenever he can, and all of it coated with the rosy sheen of familiarity and nostalgia.

But again, this is the kind of heritage picture that the British (or the British as led by a director from Denmark) do so well, and again, so it proves. While the plot and its surrounding storylines all have the look and feel of scenarios we’ve seen before – and too many times at that – the best thing that can be said about Their Finest is that the director, the writer, the cast, the crew, hell everyone involved, knew this was true, and proceeded without a moment’s hesitation in using that knowledge as the basis for providing audiences with a very enjoyable movie indeed. Is Their Finest a true original, groundbreaking and constantly surprising? No, it’s not. Is it a movie that will change anyone’s life? Again, no, it’s not. But it is a movie that does do something unexpected: it makes the movie within the movie, The Nancy Starling, the emotional core of everything, and it does so with a carefree, nonchalant sense of entitlement that you couldn’t have predicted at the start. It’s here that Hilliard proves what a fine actor he really is, it’s here where a lunkhead American soldier can appear soulful and poetic, and where traditional values around serving the greater good and unavoidable personal sacrifice are made self-evident.

While the movie within a movie offers more dramatic meat than its parent, what the rest of the movie does offer is a recognisable template to hang a romantic comedy with dramatic elements on. It does this effectively and with a minimum of fuss, and gives the audience a succession of self-reflexive feelgood moments where anticipation is satisfied and rewarded thanks to the script’s commitment to playing it (pleasantly) safe. Only two moments stand out as being darker than all the rest. One is a bitter reflection on the realities of death by bombing, while the other is a “twist” that is as bold as it is dispiriting. Otherwise and elsewhere, the movie maintains its wry, comedic edge and its avoidance of being too serious.

Scherfig injects her usual bonhomie into things, keeping it all light enough to fly away forever, and doing so with a studied sense of what’s acceptable in terms of such lightweight material. A quality cast helps tremendously with Arterton displaying a charm and likeability that has been missing from more recent roles, while Claflin is all pent-up superiority and diffidence as the movie’s real leading man. Nighy invites the viewer to laugh at Hilliard with affection, while further down the cast list, McCrory scores highly as another woman attempting to do well in a traditionally man’s world. It’s all neatly held together by Gaby Chiappe’s heartfelt and engaging script, and the scenes behind the making of the movie within a movie are terrific in the way that they expose some of the tricks of the trade back in the Forties. It’s dourly glamorous too, with fine cinematography by Sebastian Blenkov, and there’s a suitably nostalgic yet rousing score by Rachel Portman that perfectly accentuates the movie’s sprightly tone.

Rating: 7/10 – an enjoyable piece of wartime flag-waving, Their Finest is funny, romantic, occasionally dramatic, and as winsome as it can be given its backdrop; entertaining in a generic yet fulfilling way, the movie coasts along for much of its running time, but it does so in such an amiable fashion that most viewers won’t mind at all.

Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

06 Monday Feb 2017

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D: Mel Gibson / 139m

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Allied (2016)

16 Friday Dec 2016

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D: Robert Zemeckis / 124m

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016)

05 Saturday Nov 2016

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miss-peregrines-home-movie

D: Tim Burton / 127m

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10 Reasons to Remember Arthur Hiller (1923-2016)

17 Wednesday Aug 2016

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Arthur Hiller (22 November 1923 – 17 August 2016)

Arthur Hiller

Born in Edmonton, Canada to Jewish parents who had immigrated from Poland in 1912, Arthur Hiller grew up in an environment where a love of music and theatre was instilled in him from a young age. He joined the Royal Canadian Air Force at the start of World War II, and became a navigator, flying numerous missions over Europe. In the early Fifties he began directing for Canadian television; this led to his being offered a job directing with NBC. Over the next ten years he worked steadily in television, contributing to shows such as Playhouse 90, Perry Mason, Gunsmoke, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Route 66.

During this period he made his feature debut, the coming-of-age romantic drama The Careless Years (1957), but it wasn’t until he worked for Disney on Miracle of the White Stallions (1963) that his movie career began to take off. By then, Hiller’s ability to work within different genres was standing him in good stead, enough for him to move away from television (almost) altogether. After 1965, his TV work consisted of three episodes of the series Insight, episodes that were made over an eleven-year period. Hiller soon allied himself with screenwriters of the calibre of Paddy Chayefsky and Neil Simon, and developed a reputation for making comedies that had a surprising depth to them.

1970 saw the release of Hiller’s most famous, and enduring movie of all, Love Story. The success of the movie cemented his success, and throughout the Seventies, Hiller had a run of hit movies that made him an A-list director. His was a brisk, authoritative style, but there was also a looseness, a sense of fun to his movies that made them more enjoyable than most comedies of the era. He was inspired by a post-War screening of Rome, Open City (1945), and he never lost sight of the emotional truth of his movies, even if some of his later works, such as Carpool (1996) weren’t as effective – or as amusing – as they could have been.

In 1989, he took on the role of President of the Directors Guild of America, a position he held until 1993, when he became President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the next four years. He made one last movie, the less than pardonable National Lampoon’s Pucked (2006) (a career nadir for both Hiller and its star, Jon Bon Jovi), before retiring. Hiller will be fondly remembered for the way in which his movies resonated with audiences, their effortless likeability, and the almost timeless quality they carry, and the unassuming yet quietly confident way in which he directed them.

The Americanization of Emily

1 – The Americanization of Emily (1964)

2 – The Out of Towners (1970)

3 – Love Story (1970)

4 – Plaza Suite (1971)

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5 – The Hospital (1971)

6 – The Man in the Glass Booth (1975)

7 – Silver Streak (1976)

Silver Streak

8 – The In-Laws (1979)

9 – The Lonely Guy (1984)

10 – Outrageous Fortune (1987)

Outrageous Fortune

Ghost of the China Sea (1958)

03 Wednesday Aug 2016

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Ghost of the China Sea

D: Fred F. Sears / 79m

Cast: David Brian, Lynette Bernay, Jonathan Haze, Norman Wright, Harry Chang, Gene Bergman, Mel Prestidge

Set in the Philippines during World War II, Ghost of the China Sea is an amiable, if mostly forgettable drama about a group of civilians trying to escape the clutches of the approaching Japanese army. Trapped on an island that has begun to be invaded, and led by rough, tough ex-military man Martin French (Brian), the group – plantation owner Justine (Bernay), pacifist Reverend Darby Edwards (Wright), and plantation bookkeeper Himo Matsumo (Chang) – head for the nearby coast in the hope of finding a boat they can use to find safety on one of the other, numerous islands that make up the Philippines. Along the way they encounter Larry Peters (Haze), a seaman who has become lost on the island, but who saves them when they’re captured by the Japanese.

They help him find his ship, the Ilima, a broken-down vessel that barely qualifies as a navy ship, and which Peters refers to as the “USS Frankenstein”. They set off but soon need supplies, and discover that the Americans are being overrun and destroying any fuel and ammo dumps before moving on. Managing to get what they need, and still being pursued by the Japanese, French and co add a trio of Filipino resistance fighters to their group, and make way again. Along the way, French is challenged by Justine over his dismissive, arrogant attitude towards the others, and as the group is whittled down over time, French comes to realise that he can’t do everything by himself.

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Produced and scripted by Charles B. Griffith – better known as the screenwriter of such B-movie classics as Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), and Death Race 2000 (1975) – and shot in Hawaii, Ghost of the China Sea is as ordinary and unremarkable a wartime drama as you’re ever likely to see. Like many similarly themed movies made in the Fifties, it tells a simple story, populates it with stock characters from the period – the stoic hero, the independent-minded heroine who still needs protecting and/or saving, the comic relief – and puts them all into situations where nothing too unexpected or exciting happens. Griffith himself was unhappy with how the movie turned out, but even so, and despite several reservations that could be mentioned about the movie, it’s still worth watching if you’re interested.

A lot of what makes it worth watching is due to the efforts of its director. This was Sears’ final movie, and the last of five movies to be released following his death in November 1957 (as you can imagine, he had a very busy career). What Sears does best here is to focus on the characters and what few internal struggles they have to contend with. French is all about getting the job done, but has decided that in order to do that he has to shut off from those around him. This makes him practically unlikeable, but thanks to Sears (and Brian), French’s slow reveal as a man of hidden feeling is both believable and a relief. Also, Sears takes Wright’s pacifist reverend and makes his dilemma more heartfelt than perfunctory, and while it’s tempting to view the moment when he has to make a choice (personal integrity vs necessity) as entirely predictable, it’s an affecting moment nevertheless.

Rating: 5/10 – not as corny or pedestrian as it might seem at first glance, Ghost of the China Sea is mildly diverting stuff that benefits greatly from Sears’ direction; unloved perhaps by its writer/producer, it’s a movie that deserves a little better attention than it’s received over the years.

NOTE: Sadly, there’s no trailer available.

The Fencer (2015)

17 Tuesday May 2016

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The Fencer

Original title: Miekkailija

D: Klaus Härö / 98m

Cast: Märt Avandi, Ursula Ratasepp, Hendrik Toompere Sr, Liisa Koppel, Joonas Koff, Ann-Lisett Rebane, Elbe Reiter, Egert Kadastu, Lembit Ulfsak, Kirill Käro

The Fencer begins with a brief – but necessary – history lesson: during World War II, Estonia was occupied by Nazi Germany; most of the men were conscripted into the German army. When Estonia was absorbed into the Soviet Union, it regarded all members of the German army as war criminals, regardless of any extenuating circumstances. In the years following the war, Estonians who were known to have been a part of the German forces were tracked down by the Soviets and imprisoned.

Against this backdrop, the movie tells the story of Endel Nelis (Avandi), an Estonian and former championship fencer who was himself drafted into the German army, and who is now trying to avoid capture by the Soviets. He arrives in the small Estonian town of Haapsalu to take up a position as a teacher. His arrival is greeted with disdain by the school principal (Toompere Sr), and Endel soon finds that one of his extra duties, running the sports club, is paid lip service to by the principal, and his initial attempt to get the club up and running is undermined accordingly. But when he decides to teach fencing as part of the sports club, he finds nearly all the students turning up for the first session.

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The principal is disconcerted by this show of enthusiasm, and mistrusts it, choosing instead to try and undermine its popularity at a parents meeting. While he alludes to dire consequences if the parents vote for the fencing to continue, the grandfather (Ulfsak) of one of the boys in the club, Jaan (Koff), encourages the rest of the parents to vote to keep it going. While all this is going on, Endel is visited by his best friend, Aleksei (Käro) who warns him that people are looking for him in Leningrad (where he’s come from). And Endel begins a tentative relationship with another teacher, Kadri (Ratasepp).

As time goes on, the children make enough progress that when one of them, Marta (Koppel), learns of a national fencing tournament to be held in Leningrad, and she wants Endel to enter them, it provides him with a diffcult decision: should he risk taking some of the students to Leningrad and being caught, or should he risk losing the faith the children have in him, and with it, witness the end of the club? (As if there’s any doubt as to what decision he’ll make.) Once at the tournament, the four pupils he’s chosen to compete – Marta, Jaan, Lea (Rebane), and Toomas (Kadastu) – show that the skills they’ve developed have a good chance of seeing them win the tournament outright. But the increased presence of armed guards throughout the building points to Endel’s chances of returning to Haapsalu as being even slimmer than he’d expected.

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Directed by Härö from a script by Anna Heinämaa, The Fencer is a melancholy rumination on individualism and patriotic duty, with Endel as the protagonist seeking the kind of quiet life that everyone on the run wishes for, yet rarely attains. It’s a stately, deliberately paced movie that still manages to be impactful and modestly gripping. It has a keen sense of the story it’s telling, and makes its points about the Soviet Union’s totalitarian approach to socialism with understated precision, preferring to acknowledge small instances of the system’s control rather than focus on the larger examples that most other movies fall back on. It paints a broad picture of the times, the early Fifties, but adds sufficient detail to be both impressive and insightful. (This is best evidenced in the scene with the parents’ meeting, where the principal’s officious and condescending nature is contrasted by what is effectively the “will of the people”. His attempt at intimidation almost works, but Heinämaa and Härö ramp up the tension through the slow awareness of the parents that they have more power than the principal wants them to realise.)

Endel’s relationship with the pupils is developed naturally and without resorting to the kind of sentimental clichés that a Hollywood version might fall back on without thinking. Jaan looks up to Endel because his father is missing, while even the majority of the other children look upon him as a father figure, someone they can trust. But it’s Endel’s trust in them, his belief that they can be good, if not great, fencers that buoys their affection for him, and provides the movie with a great deal of its heart and soul. Even though he confides in Kadri that he’s not good with kids, that he doesn’t know how to deal with them, Endel still has an instinctive feel for dealing with them that allows him to forge such great relationships with them (though he’s not exactly the kind of teacher who maintains boundaries; instead he appears to make it up as he goes along).

At its heart, The Fencer is about doing the right thing, and doing it for all the right reasons, even if it comes with a personal price attached. Endel turns down the chance of moving on and hiding out in Novosibirsk, and it’s here that you begin to get the sense that Endel is finished with running, that with the sports club he’s found a place where he belongs (not to mention the love of a good woman). Endel can be seen putting his life and its value in perspective, and when he makes his choice near the movie’s end, he can be applauded for being true to himself and no one else.

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As the beleaguered teacher, Avandi has a weary yet subtly engaged manner about him that is heartwarming and sympathetic. Endel is trying to do the best he can, and it’s easy for the viewer to root for him. Avandi’s sad, doleful features tell you more about how the character is feeling than any amount of exposition, and Härö takes every opportunity to focus on those features and weave a bit of acting magic. As the “villain” of the piece, Toompere Sr is a mean-spirited pedagogue stranded in a small town and seeking affirmation through adhering to the demands of the state. He’s a low man made even lower by his actions, but thanks to Toompere Sr he’s not a man to be hated (or even despised) but pitied instead; he’s as much a prisoner of fate as Endel is.

Once the movie arrives in Leningrad, and the tournament begins, Härö wisely drops the political and social elements for a solid, ever-so-slightly-gripping batch of fencing bouts that add a bit of zest to the pacing. The final bout is played out with élan, even if the outcome goes from being unpredictable to downright obvious halfway through, and the final coda provides a bittersweet ending that smacks of wish fulfillment on the makers’ part but at least gives the viewer the happy ending they’ve been hoping for.

Rating: 8/10 – a beautifully lensed movie that features a succinct, unpretentious yet absorbing screenplay, The Fencer can best be described as the kind of movie that sneaks up on you and takes you by surprise; it’s a quietly impressive movie that only falters when it tries to up the pace and be visually more dramatic, but this is a minor concern when weighed against the many, many, many things the movie gets right.

Son of Saul (2015)

19 Tuesday Apr 2016

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Son of Saul

Original title: Saul fia

D: László Nemes / 107m

Cast: Géza Röhrig, Levente Molnár, Urs Rechn, Todd Charmont, Jerzy Walczak, Sándor Zsótér, Marcin Czarnik, Levente Orbán, Kamil Dobrowolski, Uwe Lauer, Christian Harting

Having claimed a number of awards, including an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, since its debut at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, Son of Saul has also been extremely well received by critics and was in many Top 10 lists at the end of last year. Through its central character of Saul Ausländer (Röhrig), we’re introduced to the Sonderkommandos, concentration camp work units that were usually comprised of Jews, and whose job it was to assist in the disposal of the people (and their belongings) who had been killed in the gas chambers. A Sonderkommando was never given a choice about their role, and though they had slightly better living conditions than the rest of the camp inmates, it was inevitable that they would be “retired” after three or four months of working.

Against this backdrop, and the events that took place at Auschwitz in October 1944, first-time writer/director László Nemes has fashioned a grim, harrowing, and remarkable movie debut that acknowledges the horrors of the Holocaust while also allowing for rare moments of peace and beauty and hope amidst all the despair of life in a concentration camp. How Nemes does this is perhaps the most impressive aspect of the movie, as the camera – formidably handled by DoP Mátyás Erdély – sticks close to the character of Saul and rarely strays further than a foot away from his head or shoulders. When it does, though, and the larger picture of life in the camp is revealed, it has an impact that Nemes quite carefully cultivates for maximum effect.

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With the camera being so close to Saul, Nemes also distances the background by keeping it out of focus, a decision that fits with the world as Saul sees it. There will be viewers who will find this approach annoying, and perhaps less dramatic than if the wider “world” around Saul had been revealed in all its ugly wretchedness. But this would be to miss the point of Saul’s involvement with the rest of the camp. Even before he discovers the boy who survives the gas chamber – and then only to be summarily suffocated by a Nazi doctor – and takes him to be his son, Saul has chosen to survive in the camp by cutting himself off from everyone else, and only interacting with others when he needs to. So the movie’s visual design, where events happen around Saul and without his direct involvement, are kept fuzzy and indistinct, and where Saul has chosen to keep them.

To mitigate against this distancing effect, however, Nemes has also made the movie’s sound design an integral part of the drama, as through the various sounds and noises of the camp, and those made by the inmates and the guards, the things that Saul chooses to ignore are made vividly obvious and given a chilling reality that offsets the visual composition. As the continual blurring of background images occurs so too does the sharpness of dialogue and sound effects, perhaps most effectively realised in the sequence where, with one of the gas chambers not ready to be used, the latest arrivals are taken out to the nearby woods and stripped and shot. It’s an incredible sequence, shot in a cinéma vérité style that reinforces the horrible expediency that cost so many people their lives.

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Away from the visual and aural decisions that make the movie look and sound like no other Holocaust movie before it, Saul’s story is a simple one: he wants to give the boy he believes to be his son a proper burial, and the attendant service given by a rabbi (Saul is not a practising religious man; as a result he doesn’t realise that a rabbi isn’t necessary for what he wants to do). Saul becomes obsessed with making his plan happen, but it proves harder to achieve than he thought. He’s unable to find a rabbi who will perform the ceremony, and his efforts to find one are constantly interrupted or foiled by the demands of some of the other Sonderkommandos. They’re planning an uprising, and want Saul to help them. His attempts to please them and also satisfy his own needs form the basis of the narrative, but Nemes makes it clear that Saul’s need to bury the boy is his first priority.

Again, some viewers may have an issue with the single-mindedness that Saul adopts here, as he jeopardises both his own life and those of his fellow Sonderkommandos as he seeks out a rabbi. His determination is such that he acts recklessly, and seemingly without regard for his own safety or the safety of others. An attempt to photograph some of the atrocities carried out at the camp is nearly discovered thanks to Saul’s unthinking behaviour, and later, when he finds someone he believes to be a rabbi (Charmont), Saul nearly ends up being mistaken for a new arrival (and killed). And when circumstances dictate that the uprising needs to happen sooner than planned, Saul’s only concern is ensuring that the boy’s body is kept safe enough to be buried still. But it’s this dogged refusal to give up that enables Saul to keep going, it’s his way of retaining some humanity in the face of the wanton cruelty he sees each and every day.

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As Saul, Röhrig gives an incredible, melancholy performance that is built on telling expressions and a minimal amount of dialogue. Saul is a man consumed by reticence and detachment, focused on whatever he himself is doing at any given moment, and Röhrig, whose only previous acting experience was in a Hungarian TV show in 1989, shows the character’s distance from his surroundings as both a blessing and a curse. It’s a finely nuanced and controlled performance, intelligent and surprisingly emotive, and his ability to display a variety of emotions through the mask-like appearance Saul adopts in the camp is a masterclass in screen acting.

In addressing the issue of the Sonderkommandos and their place in the concentration camps, Nemes is also giving a voice to the people who didn’t survive the camps. It’s a fine distinction to make when so many other Holocaust movies celebrate the survivors over the ones who met their fates in a gas chamber. It makes the movie a bleaker experience than most, and its haunting, distressing tone is all the more forceful and compelling because of it. Son of Saul may not be a comfortable movie to watch, and it may not be rewarding in the traditional sense, but it is a testament to the tenacity and the courage of those who found themselves in one of the worst predicaments ever: that of aiding in the deaths of millions of people like themselves.

Rating: 9/10 – expertly handled, and refusing to indulge in any kind of melodrama, Son of Saul is one of the finest Holocaust movies ever made; intense, horrible (and horrifying), disturbing, and brilliant, there are moments that will linger in the memory, but in shining a light on a rarely discussed aspect of “life” in the camps, the movie earns its place in cinema history as an important historical record.

10 Reasons to Remember Ken Adam (1921-2016)

12 Saturday Mar 2016

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Ken Adam (5 February 1921 – 10 March 2016)

Ken Adam

One of the movie industry’s most accomplished and creative production designers, Ken Adam was responsible for some of the most iconic images seen on screens over the last sixty years. During World War II he was one of only three German-born pilots allowed to fly for the RAF (and was trained by Michael Rennie). After the war he began his career in the movie industry as a draughtsman on This Was a Woman (1948), a modest British crime drama starring Sonia Dresdel. From there he did a lot of uncredited work on movies as varied as Dick Barton Strikes Back (1949) and The Crimson Pirate (1952) before landing a job supporting the esteemed William Cameron Menzies as an art director on Mike Todd’s ambitious and lavish Around the World in Eighty Days (1956). Menzies inspired Adam to “forget my inhibitions and let myself go”. This proved to be wise counsel indeed, and Adam continued to work on lavish movie projects like Ben-Hur (1959) (albeit still uncredited).

With his career beginning to take off, and his work attracting significant notice, Adam struck gold with his work on The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960), a movie that introduced him to producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli. When Broccoli needed a production designer for a movie he was making about a spy created by Ian Fleming, he approached Adam, who took the job even though he felt he was “prostituting” himself. Dr. No (1962) proved to be the first of seven Bond movies Adam worked on, and each one earned him an increasing level of recognition, especially Blofeld’s volcano lair in You Only Live Twice (1967). But while his lasting association with the Bond movies cemented his reputation, Adam was equally adept at working with directors of the calibre of Stanley Kubrick, Herbert Ross and Norman Jewison. As his career progressed he won two Oscars – for Barry Lyndon (1975) and The Madness of King George (1994) – and in 2003 he was knighted. His style was always to marry the old and the new in ever more unusual ways, while somehow managing to retain a feeling for the now. He could be grandiose for Bond, and yet equally at home with something less visually dramatic, such as Agnes of God (1985). He was an original, a talented individual that producers and directors could always rely on to give them something unexpected, and unexpectedly brilliant… such as the car in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), and how much more unexpectedly brilliant was that?

Night of the Demon

1 – Night of the Demon (1957)

2 – Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

3 – Goldfinger (1964)

4 – You Only Live Twice (1967)

5 – The Ipcress File (1965)

6 – Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968)

7 – Barry Lyndon (1975)

8 – The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976)

9 – The Freshman (1990)

10 – The Madness of King George (1994)

The Madness of King George

Dad’s Army (2016)

09 Tuesday Feb 2016

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Dad's Army

D: Oliver Parker / 100m

Cast: Toby Jones, Bill Nighy, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Tom Courtenay, Michael Gambon, Blake Harrison, Daniel Mays, Bill Paterson, Mark Gatiss, Sarah Lancashire, Felicity Montagu, Alison Steadman, Emily Atack, Holli Dempsey, Julia Foster, Annette Crosbie, Ian Lavender, Frank Williams

Those of a certain age will remember the original UK TV series that ran from 1968 to 1977. It was immensely popular, with episodes regularly hitting the eighteen million mark for viewers, and it spawned a radio version, a stage version, and in 1971, there was even a movie featuring the original cast. Even today, repeat showings of Dad’s Army garner viewing figures in the low millions. It’s a national institution, and one of the few shows in the UK that pretty much everyone either likes or has a soft spot for. In short, it’s that good.

And now we have a remake to contend with, an updating (of necessity) of the cast – though series’ veteran Frank Williams does return as the vicar – and an attempt at recreating past glories with a slightly modern slant attached. When the project was first announced in 2014, the reaction amongst fans wasn’t as enthusiastic as the makers would have hoped, and when the trailer was first shown in cinemas in late 2015, some audiences gave it a less than warm reception. The general consensus seemed to be: this can’t be any good… can it?

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The short answer is no. This version is so disappointing that for much of its running time, viewers will be wondering how the makers could have got it so badly wrong, and with such consistency. It’s obvious from the opening scenes that find the platoon attempting to capture a bull, and which lead to their running scattershot across a field while the camera adopts the POV of the bull, that this isn’t going to be the warmly humorous affair that the series was, or as cleverly constructed. And as the movie continues, introducing its tired plot centred around the Allied invasion in 1944 and the search for a German spy, it becomes abundantly clear that whatever merits Hamish McColl’s screenplay may have had, they’ve not been transferred to the screen.

In this version, as opposed to the series, Captain Mainwaring (a game but badly undermined Toby Jones) is portrayed not as the officious prig that he was on TV but as a bumbling idiot. Sergeant Wilson (Nighy) was always the quiet Lothario, but now we’re asked to believe that he would fall so easily and in such a headstrong way for a woman from his past, the worldly-wise journalist Rose Winters (Zeta-Jones) (he was her tutor at Oxford, which raises all sorts of questions that thankfully the script doesn’t want to explore). And then there’s the rest of the platoon: nervous Corporal Jones (Courtenay, going from the sublime 45 Years to this farrago), addled Private Godfrey (an admittedly well cast Michael Gambon), doomy Private Frazer (Paterson), upbeat spiv Private Walker (Mays), and dopey Private Pike (The Inbetweeners’ Harrison). If nothing else, it’s a great cast, but it’s also a cast who are given so little to do in real terms (other than to keep advancing the plot – there’s an incredible amount of exposition here) that one ultimately wonders what was the point of hiring them.

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When the best you can do with actors of this calibre is have them stand around in a church hall for no better reason than to see how terrible they are as a Home Guard – which we already know – and then repeat the same three or four more times, it shows up the paucity of ideas on display. The rivalry between Mainwaring and Wilson, so beautifully enacted by Arthur Lowe and John Le Mesurier on TV, is retained, but with Mainwaring appearing so petulant and bullying in his responses to Wilson that all the subtlety of their relationship is lost, abandoned possibly from the first draft. Corporal Jones’s nervous anxiety in the face of danger is poorly channelled by Courtenay (who never seems comfortable in the role), while Private Pike’s innate stupidity is bolstered for some reason by his quoting famous lines from the movies of the period and being made to look like Errol Flynn (and all to little effect). Only Gambon succeeds in beating the odds, making Godfrey endearingly silly in his dotage, but then the character isn’t given anything else to do other than be endearingly silly, so Gambon can’t go wrong.

And then there’s the plot, the kind of hackneyed attempt at combining contemporary concerns with light humour that the series would have done more justice to, and more effectively, in under half an hour. The original scripts by Jimmy Perry and David Croft were tightly constructed, beautifully observant of their characters’ foibles, and the humour always arose from those foibles; everything was in service to the characters. Here it’s the opposite, and the characters are shoehorned into a plot that never gets off the ground (unlike a certain number of tanks). Thankfully, the script doesn’t attempt to hide the identity of its German spy (and their identity is easily deduced from the trailer), so that’s one hurdle it doesn’t have to stumble over in the dark, but it does lay a massive egg in the form of Mark Gatiss’ Major Theakes, a martinet senior officer with an unexplained limp and a penchant for fitting the war in around his leisure activities. It feels like Theakes is there as a satirical nod to the incompetencies of the command structure, but if so, he’s out of place and would be better off appearing in a World War I tale instead.

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The movie is also one of the blandest, most visually depressing movies to watch in some time, its dour colour palette and compromised colour range doing little to engage the senses beyond the red dress worn by Zeta-Jones. Even the outdoor scenes seem to have been filmed only on days when the skies were overcast and/or gloomy. And the final shootout is so devoid of tension and excitement that you can only hope it’s all over with as quickly as possible.

If it seems unfair to judge Dad’s Army 2016 with the original show, then it’s because the original was so good, and this isn’t. This is laboured, uninspired, woeful stuff in places, and not a tribute to the enduring qualities of the TV show in any way, shape or form. Even the attempts to squeeze in the various catchphrases from the show are awkwardly handled, and some you might even miss as you fight to maintain a decent level of attention. With the show having gained such a level of respect and admiration and affection over the years, to have this released now, and to be so badly put together, begs the question that’s asked here quite often: why didn’t anyone realise how bad this was when they were making it, or was it all too late if they did?

Rating: 3/10 – another example of a UK TV sitcom given a lacklustre cinema outing, Dad’s Army should stand as a warning to other movie makers looking to adapt a small screen favourite; with a script that forgot to include any jokes, or anything that an audience that could react to by laughing out loud, this should be avoided by anyone who loves the series and who doesn’t want that love tarnished by what’s been attempted here.

Pan (2015) or: One More Unnecessary Origin Movie

16 Wednesday Dec 2015

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Pan

D: Joe Wright / 111m

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Levi Miller, Garrett Hedlund, Rooney Mara, Amanda Seyfried, Adeel Akhtar, Nonso Anozie, Kathy Burke, Lewis MacDougall, Cara Delevingne

Let’s cut to the chase: Pan, by itself, is a disappointment, an uneven children’s fantasy movie that is disjointed, awkwardly humorous, suffers from production overkill, and makes very little sense throughout. But unfortunately, Pan isn’t just a movie by itself, it’s an origin story for a beloved children’s tale that didn’t need it in the first place.

In recent years, Hollywood has given us origin story after origin story in an attempt to expand franchises and add “depth” to existing stories. Last year we had Maleficent, a movie that tried to rewrite the Sleeping Beauty story to make its Wicked Queen a more sympathetic character, as if somebody somewhere had decided that a Wicked Queen couldn’t just be a Wicked Queen; no, there had to be a good reason why she was a Wicked Queen. And now we get to see how a foundling called Peter became the high-flying leader of the Lost Boys, Peter Pan. But did we need to? Perhaps there’s a clue in the fact that J.M. Barrie, who created Peter Pan, never felt the need to go back and provide an origin story for him. And if he didn’t feel the need to, do we really need to know either?

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But Hollywood knows better (or so they like to think), and now we have an origin story anyway, but one that’s been given so little thought it’s frightening given all the talent involved in making it. You only have to watch the first five minutes of Pan to know that the makers have got it completely, spectacularly wrong. The scene is London, between the two World Wars. An unidentified young woman, clearly scared and frightened that she’s being followed, carries an infant with her until she reaches the doorstep of the Lambert Home for Boys. There she leaves him but not before she’s told him that they’ll meet again, in this world or another. Already there’s a problem: why does the woman abandon her son so recklessly (it’s not the most pleasant-looking of orphanages) and if he’s in as much danger as she seems to think, why take the risk of leaving him in such an awful place?

We fast forward twelve years and find the infant has grown up to be Peter (Miller), and he’s still at the orphanage (surprise, surprise), and he’s a bright, confident child who has no problem challenging authority, in this case Kathy Burke’s snarling, growling, thoroughly unpleasant Sister Barnabas. At this point the movie introduces a superfluous subplot involving Sister Barnabas hoarding goods before Peter and some of the orphans are kidnapped by pirates who descend through the skylights on bungee cords (the dormitory is located conveniently in the roofspace). Now correct me if I’m wrong, but this now makes the woman’s decision to leave Peter there a tad careless, as she’s placed him in the very place that her adversary – who we learn is the pirate Blackbeard (Jackman) – is stealing children from. (What it is to be undone by unforeseen coincidence…)

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Once in Neverland, the movie takes a left turn by introducing Blackbeard and his merry band of pirates, and what looks like thousands of Lost Boys, as they indulge in a  bit of a sing-song. The song in question turns out to be Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, an anachronistic choice that serves only to remind viewers just how well this sort of thing was done in A Knight’s Tale (2001) (and begs the question, does Blackbeard time travel as well for his Lost Boys?). From then on, and despite the introduction of James Hook (Hedlund) (also trapped by Blackbeard), and Tiger Lily (Mara), the princess of the natives, and a plot involving Blackbeard’s determined efforts to wipe out all the fairies (don’t ask why – the movie doesn’t), Pan becomes the Hugh Jackman larger-than-life performance movie as he struts and rampages and roars his way through things with all the gusto of a pantomime villain. It’s not a bad performance per se, it’s just in the wrong movie.

As you’d expect, Neverland is beautifully, stunningly realised, and is a triumph of art direction, set construction, costume design, and special effects, but ultimately it all makes for a hollow confection, an empty shell that the narrative flits and jumps around without any clear idea of where it’s going or why. With the fairies hidden from Blackbeard’s grasp, and of course with Peter as his unwitting accomplice in getting to them, it comes as no surprise that the script shows the fairies completely able to defend themselves from Blackbeard and his men, thus ending any idea that the pirate’s intentions were in any way a threat. It’s not the first time in the movie that the  viewer is likely to be wondering why something is happening, or if it’s likely to be explained (usually not).

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Pan is a movie that should be included in the ever-growing number of movies that come under the heading, Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should. Joe Wright’s direction is focused largely on the cast, and while he’s obviously let Jackman do his own thing, he does allow Mara to give a decent performance, and Miller is suitably stout-hearted as Peter, even if he does take everything in his stride a little too easily. And Hedlund acts more by smiling roguishly than actually emoting, but it’s still a likeable portrayal. The only trouble is, Hook is a character who lacks for development, and remains the same from beginning to end.

Pan‘s terrible performance at the box office – so far it’s only grossed $125m against a budget of $150m – will hopefully discourage other studios/production companies from messing with other established, classic stories. These stories are so well-regarded for a reason: they work independently of any others and in many cases are archetypal and don’t need further embellishment or expansion. Such is the case with Barrie’s tale of the boy who never grew up, and Pan serves only to reinforce what a foolhardy idea it is to try.

Rating: 4/10 – lacking a true sense of childlike wonder, or focus in the story it’s telling, Pan is the movie equivalent of pudding: rich, stolid, and if you’ve had too much, weighing too heavily for comfort; another unsatisfactory, unnecessary origin story that shows just how difficult it is to get these things right, and especially when there’s no real need to.

A Royal Night Out (2015)

15 Sunday Nov 2015

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A Royal Night Out

D: Julian Jarrold / 97m

Cast: Sarah Gadon, Bel Powley, Jack Reynor, Rupert Everett, Emily Watson, Jack Laskey, Jack Gordon, Roger Allam, Ruth Sheen

A Royal Night Out is based on real events: on V.E. Day, May 8 1945, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret went out in a group that included their nanny, several friends, and a military detail as protection (one of whom was Group Captain Peter Townsend, who would later have a relationship with Margaret). They were charged by their father, King George VI, to be home by one a.m. – which they were. Nothing of any real significance happened, and the evening passed off without incident.

But in an attempt to overcome this disappointing outcome, A Royal Night Out chooses to paint an entirely different portrait of what happened that night, and in doing so, pushes the boundaries of credibility at every turn. It’s a movie that embraces the newspaper cry of “Print the Legend!”, and has no intention of worrying about just how far-fetched or unlikely it all is. And thanks to one of the most careless and poorly constructed screenplays of recent years – courtesy of Trevor De Silva and Kevin Hood – the movie limps from one unconvincing scene to another, and never once provides a moment’s plausibility.

From the moment that Gadon’s Elizabeth and Powley’s Margaret are introduced – responsible and carefree respectively – it’s clear that these characterisations aren’t going to change much as the movie progresses. Elizabeth is the thoughtful, considerate sister, always looking out for her younger, less mature sibling. Margaret is a pleasure-seeker, stifled by the conventions of royal life, and looking for a chance to express her more extrovert nature. Although there is some truth in both these approaches – Margaret definitely liked a good party – by reducing both young women to such paper-thin representations of their real counterparts, the movie avoids asking its audience to identify with them at all.

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What the movie does to compensate is to infuse the action with liberal dollops of comedy. Surprisingly, a lot of it works, even though it’s often corny, and relies on the idea that Elizabeth and Margaret are so far removed from “ordinary” folk that they’re unable to deal with the simplest of social interactions. The humour is also derived in part from a lazy interpretation of the social divide between the princesses and the people they meet. Margaret is far too trusting, while Elizabeth becomes acutely aware of how little she really knows about everyday people. It’s predictable stuff, and if it wasn’t for the jokes, the movie would be dangerously difficult to sit through.

As well as De Silva and Hood’s just-enough-done-to-get-by script, there’s Jarrold’s lacklustre direction to contend with. There are moments when it really seems as if he settled for the first take and had no interest in finding out if the actors had anything else to offer. Whole stretches of the movie play out at a sedated pace that deadens each scene it touches, and it makes the performances seem stilted and free from nuance. Jarrold, whose last theatrical feature was the similarly underwhelming Brideshead Revisited (2008), misses almost every opportunity to make the movie relevant to its time frame, and concentrates instead on various levels of slapstick and farce to push the narrative forward. It leaves the movie feeling disjointed and as unconcerned about itself as Margaret is when she goes off with a man she doesn’t know.

97-Girls Night Out-Photo Nick Wall.NEF

There are issues with the various relationships as well. Elizabeth meets AWOL airman Jack (Reynor) who helps her find Margaret after they’re separated. You can tell straight away that the script wants them to get together, but at the same time it wants to stay true to historical events, so what we’re left with is an attraction that can’t (and doesn’t) lead anywhere, and which is entirely redundant as a plot device. The same can be said for Jack’s AWOL status, a dramatic angle that is resolved with the neatness of a parcel tied up with string. (There really isn’t anything in the movie that the viewer won’t be able to guess the outcome of – and long before it happens.)

Elsewhere, Laskey and Gordon play their military detail roles as if they were auditioning for an X Factor comedy special, with Laskey mugging for all he’s worth, and Gordon’s Lieutenant Burridge behaving in such an inappropriate manner it’s ridiculous. Allam is introduced late on as a mix of low-rent pimp and black marketeer who Margaret calls Lord Stan, but it’s the fanciful way in which her royal status is exploited that raises a chuckle, as Stan uses her to get some of his working girls inside the Chelsea Barracks, and circulating amongst the guests at a party there. Again it’s this kind of non-threatening, breezy plotting that hampers the movie and stops it from having any kind of edge.

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The cast are left adrift to fend for themselves, with Watson coming off best by (ostensibly) directing herself, while the likes of Everett, Allam and Powley are stranded playing caricatures. Reynor can’t do anything with his establishment-baiting airman, and Gadon looks bewildered throughout, as if she can’t quite believe what she’s being asked to do (though, to be fair, her bewilderment could be down to the demands of the script).

Away from the uninspired direction and unimaginative script, A Royal Night Out struggles to rise above its TV movie look and feel, and some of the myriad night shots look like they were filmed during the day. And with the best will – or art direction – in the world, Hull is no substitute for London, leaving several scenes feeling incomplete in terms of the movie’s visual style. As a result, Christophe Beaucarne’s photography is choppy at best, though it suits the muddy compositions. And Luke Dunkley’s editing is so haphazard in its approach that a lot of scenes lack that all-important through line.

Rating: 4/10 – even though it’s an interpretation of what “might” have happened on the night of 8 May 1945, A Royal Night Out‘s script shows such a lack of imagination almost any other interpretation would be preferable; saved entirely by its sense of humour, and despite its being entirely nonsensical at times, the movie is one of those ideas that seemed like a good one at the time, but which should have been left well alone by all concerned.

For One Week Only: Australian Cinema – Part III

21 Friday Aug 2015

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Australian Cinema Part III – 1941-1970

With Australia’s entry into the Second World War in 1939, movie production dwindled in support of the war effort. Movies continued to be made but they were few and far between, and were dependent on their producers’ confidence in claiming enough of the domestic and international markets to be worthwhile in making. Cinesound Productions, though they’d stopped making feature length movies, were still making newsreels, and in 1942 they won the Oscar for Best Documentary for their full-length edition of the Cinesound Review entitled Kokoda Front Line! Other, fictional, propaganda movies were made (in keeping with similar efforts made in other countries at war); these included Forty Thousand Horsemen (1940), and The Rats of Tobruk (1944). (Both movies were directed by Charles Chauvel, and ever since 1992, the Brisbane International Film Festival has awarded a Chauvel Award for distinguished contributions to Australian cinema.) But once the war was over, any expected upturn in production failed to materialise, as can be seen by the release of just one movie in 1948, Always Another Dawn.

The Forties did see the emergence of homegrown stars who would go on to have international careers, actors such as Peter Finch (actually born in England) and Chips Rafferty. Rafferty was the star of one of Australia’s finest movies of the Forties, a saga of drovers transporting a large herd of cattle across 1600 miles of inhospitable outback. Produced by Ealing, it was very, very successful at the box office, with an estimated 350,000 Australians having seen it by February 1947, six months after its release.

Overlanders, The

The Overlanders (1946) / D: Harry Watt / 91m

Cast: Chips Rafferty, John Nugent Hayward, Daphne Campbell, Jean Blue, Helen Grieve, John Fernside, Peter Pagan, Frank Ransome, Stan Tolhurst, Clyde Combo, Henry Murdoch

1942. With the threat of invasion by Japanese forces, many Australians feel it’s only a matter of time before they’re overrun. People in the north of the country begin evacuating their homes to head south and burning them in a kind of “scorched earth” policy. One such family are the Parsons: Bill (Hayward), his wife (Blue), and their two daughters, Mary (Campbell) and Helen (Grieve).

Meanwhile, in the Kimberley District of Western Australia, a meat export centre has been directed to pack up its operation and for its men to head south. When the manager (Tolhurst) tells cattle man Dan McAlpine (Rafferty) that the cattle will need to be shot, Dan comes up with an alternative: to drive the cattle – all 958 of them – overland to Queensland, a distance of 1500 miles. He manages to enlist some of his co-workers to help him, including a sailor, Sinbad (Pagan) a couple of aborigines, Jacky (Combo) and Nipper (Murdoch), and generally work-shy Corky (Fernside). As they make plans to set out, the Parsons’ join them.

At first, the drove is slow going. A couple of months pass of fairly easy travel before they reach the North-South Road, but a week later they encounter the first obstacle to reaching the East Coast, a crocodile-infested river that they need to cross. The crossing goes well with no loss of cattle, but on the other side the drove finds its second obstacle, scrubland that gives the cattle little to feed on; this also slows them down to making only five miles a day instead of an average ten or twelve. A little while later, a tragedy leaves them short of horses, but salvation proves to be at hand (and close by) in the form of a group of brumbies (wild horses). They trap and break enough of them to allow the drove to continue on, and soon they arrive at an outpost, Anthony’s Lagoon where they get fresh supplies.

The next leg of the drove proves even harder, with no surface water or much feed for the cattle, but all goes well though tempers are frayed due to the conditions. When they reach the Queensland border they have to stop so that the cattle can be inoculated. While this is done, Corky reveals his plans following the war to set up a company for the exploitation of land and mineral rights in the Northern Territory, a plan Dan is none too happy to hear about. That same night, Sinbad and Mary reveal their feelings for each other, and the cattle are spooked, causing a stampede. In the attempt to halt them, Sinbad is badly injured; Mary tries to alert the inoculation team who are leaving on the plane that brought them there, but they take off before she can reach them.

With no other option open to them, Sinbad is put on the back of the supply wagon and Mrs Parsons and Helen leave the drove to take him to the nearest place with a wireless that can summon the flying doctor. The drove then faces another setback at the next watering hole which is dry. Needing to water the cattle in the next two days or face losing them all, Dan must take a risk in taking them over a range of rocky hills along a track more suited for goats than cattle.

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Though shot in black and white, The Overlanders was the first Australian movie to be filmed almost entirely outdoors. This allowed the makers to shoot some of the most rugged and breathtaking scenery in the country’s northern states, as well as providing audiences with a realistic look at a cattle drove and the problems it might face. It was based on an actual event that occurred in 1942 where 100,000 cattle were driven 2,000 miles to avoid the (expected) Japanese invasion. Although the movie had to scale back those numbers out of necessity – though 958 is quoted as the number of cattle on the drove, Ealing only used 500 – it’s still an impressive looking sight, especially when the drove is seen from a distance.

The sheer physical effort involved in bringing the movie to the screen is impressive, with the river crossing a particular highlight. The cast look the part too (though Pagan’s hairstyle marks him out as the matinee idol in the making), with Rafferty looking so at home in the saddle, and giving such a natural performance it’s no surprise that Ealing signed him to a long-term contract before the movie was even released. He’s possibly the quintessential pre-1970’s Australian actor, honest, as rugged as the country around him, and refreshingly no-nonsense in his approach to the art of acting. He’s an actor for whom a false note would be impossible, and here his condemnation of the plan to exploit the Northern Territory’s resources shows an impassioned side that is as plainly felt as it is expressed.

With the movie’s verisimilitude firmly in place and the location photography adding to the effectiveness of the overall drama, writer/director Watt’s decision to spend around eighteen months preparing the movie paid off handsomely (he even spent 1944 following the route of the original drove). His script is one of the most succinct and straightforward of the period, and is so lean it feels effortless in its construction. His original ending was more cynical than the one used but it wouldn’t have felt out of place; underneath all the belated pro-Australian war effort propaganda, there’s an undeniable sense that the country was on the cusp of some profound and far-reaching changes.

The movie does start out a little slowly, but sets out its stall with a minimum of fuss, and while the first hour sees everything go well, the inevitable setbacks and life-threatening situations make the movie more gripping, although in a matter-of-fact way that, weirdly, is entirely apposite. It speaks to the Aussie mentality of “let’s just get it done”, and shows the characters almost welcoming the adversity as a way of proving either their manhood (if male) or their unspoken capability (if female). Mary is congratulated on heading off the stampede, but she shrugs it off as no more appropriate than if she’d made dinner for everyone, so confident is she in her own abilities. It’s a small, neat touch that says everything you need to know about the characters’ inner strengths, and not just Mary’s, as they’re all so attuned to what they’re doing (and even if Corky is looking much further ahead than the others).

There’s a rousing score by English composer John Ireland that manages to be evocative at the same time, and the photography, so ravishing to look at, comes courtesy of Osmond Borradaile, a Canadian whose experience in shooting location footage more than justified Watt’s decision to hire him. And though Watt was unhappy with the way Inman Hunter edited the movie and brought in Leslie Norman to take over, whatever the final percentage of each man’s work, the movie is seamless and the decision doesn’t show in the finished product. And you have to admire a movie that includes the line, “bullocks are more important than bullets”.

Rating: 9/10 – an engrossing, simply told tale that highlights the strengths of the Australian movie industry at the time, The Overlanders is a tribute to both the men and women who lived through the threat of Japanese occupation and did their best to live outside the shadow of that dreadful possibility; with the Australian outback looking both daunting and alluring, it’s a movie that celebrates the country and its people’s apparently unflagging fortitude, and does so in such a skilful way that it stays in the memory long after it’s seen.

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In the Fifties, Australia became the place to make movies if you were a foreign production company (such as Ealing). But there was a degree of irony attached to this development, as movie makers from around the world came to Australia to make movies that depicted Australian life and culture, or were adaptations of Australian stories or literature. Chief amongst these were the likes of A Town Like Alice (1956) and The Shiralee (1957), but while they were made in Australia, they weren’t Australian movies; they were made by British or American companies and so were British or American movies. One movie made in the Fifties that was wholeheartedly Australian, funding and all, was Jedda (1955), notable for being the first Australian movie shot in colour, and for its casting of two Aboriginal actors – Ngarla Kunoth and Robert Tudawali – in the lead roles (it was also the last movie to be directed by Charles Chauvel).

Elsewhere though, indigenous movie making was struggling to make any kind of an impact. Robbery Under Arms (1957) was an exception, but otherwise there were few production companies that were willing or able to make movies that would have bolstered the industry’s standing, or made any headway at the box office. In 1958, the Australian Film Institute was founded, its mission to promote the industry both at home and abroad. The Institute also set up the annual AFI Awards which were designed in part to “improve the impoverished state of Australian cinema”. That first year there were seven categories: Documentary, Educational, Advertising, Experimental Film, Public Relations, and an Open category for any movie that didn’t fit any of the other criteria. Such was the parlous state of the industry at the time – and on into the Sixties – that it wasn’t until 1969 and Jack and Jill: A Postscript that a feature movie was given an award.

The Sixties began with a rare fillip for the industry in the form of Fred Zinnemann’s The Sundowners (1960), but it was a US/UK/Australian production, and without Zinnemann’s passion for the project, unlikely to have been made under other circumstances. The situation worsened as the decade continued. Clay (1965) was entered for the Palm Award at the Cannes Film Festival, but again this was a rare event that provided a momentary boost for an otherwise moribund industry. Even They’re a Weird Mob (1966), directed by Michael Powell, and featuring familiar faces such as Chips Rafferty, Ed Devereaux, John Meillon and Clare Dunne, couldn’t do much to stem the tide of inertia (though some say it was an inspiration to the generation of movie makers who would follow in the Seventies). (Look closely and you can see Jeanie Drynan and Jacki Weaver in early roles.)

Powell would return to Australia to make Age of Consent (1969) but as the decade drew to an end there was no sign that the movie industry was going anywhere but as steadily downhill as it had been since the late Forties.

Woman in Gold (2015)

15 Wednesday Jul 2015

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Woman in Gold

D: Simon Curtis / 109m

Cast: Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds, Daniel Brühl, Katie Holmes, Tatiana Maslany, Max Irons, Charles Dance, Antje Traue, Elizabeth McGovern, Jonathan Pryce, Frances Fisher, Moritz Bleibtreu, Tom Schilling, Allan Corduner, Henry Goodman, Nina Kunzendorf, Justus von Dohnányi

Following the death of her sister, Maria Altmann (Mirren), who fled from Austria before the war and now resides in Los Angeles, finds letters that relate to an attempt to recover artwork that her family owned before it was stolen by the Nazis, and in particular, the famous Klimt painting, Woman in Gold (who in reality was Maria’s aunt Adele). This painting and several other items are on display in a gallery in Vienna, Maria’s birthplace. Wanting to get them back, she enlists the help of a friend’s son, lawyer E. Randol Schoenberg (Reynolds).

They travel to Vienna – against Maria’s initial wishes – but find that the country’s minister and art director are unwilling to hear her case. The Klimt painting is regarded as a national treasure, and Maria is told that it was given to the gallery in Adele’s will. Schoenberg, aided by Austrian journalist Hubertus Czernin (Brühl), discovers that it wasn’t Adele’s property in the first place, but even though this evidence is presented to the Austrian officials, and a hearing takes place, Maria’s claim is denied. Unable to challenge the ruling because the cost is too prohibitive, Maria and Schoenberg return to the US.

Some time later, Schoenberg is browsing in a bookstore when he sees an art book with the Woman in Gold on the cover. It gives him an idea but Maria is against pursuing the claim any further. He manages to persuade her to move forward, and using precedents relating to retroactive art restitution claims, begins the process of suing the Austrian government for the return of the artwork. The case goes all the way to the Supreme Court, where the case is ruled in Maria’s favour. But it still means she and Schoenberg need to return to Vienna to resolve the claim completely. Maria refuses to go, and Schoenberg goes by himself. There he pleads their case to the art restitution board, a panel of three who are the last hurdle in the attempt to get the artwork returned.

Woman in Gold - scene

If you’re already aware of the case of the Woman in Gold, then you’ll know how the movie ends, but in many ways the outcome – which most people could accurately predict – isn’t the focus here, but the way in which notions of family and heritage are portrayed via the flashbacks to Maria’s youth, and the resonance they have in the present day.

The modern day scenes, while adequately presented and lensed in a way that adds a sheen to events, are moderately effective and benefit greatly from the performances of Mirren and Reynolds. But they’re also largely perfunctory, a predictable set of events and occasions that tick all the appropriate boxes: investigation, doubts, bureaucratic indolence, setback, regrouping, pushing forward to a final resolution. It’s all handled with intelligence and precision but this actually robs the modern day scenes of any emotion. Despite Mirren’s semi-anguished, semi-determined portrayal, and Reynolds’ naïve yet stubborn lawyer, the movie seems too generic in these moments, as if it were following some kind of true story template.

Where the movie improves is in its recreation of the younger Maria’s family life, the relationship she has with her parents, and the myriad relatives and friends that populate their apartment. Here there’s life aplenty, and a sense of an age when life wasn’t about looking back. In contrast to the older Maria’s attempts to reclaim what’s rightfully hers, the scenes from her youth are redolent of ownership of both the times and the place they live in. It’s a microcosm to be sure, but one that you feel would have been replicated in many other homes as well. When that ownership turns to loss, and Maria and her husband Fritz make plans to leave Austria for the US, and in doing so leave their families to an uncertain fate, the emotional strain is clearly and effectively shown, giving those scenes the resonance the modern day story lacks.

That said, in the hands of Mirren and Reynolds, the quest to win back the Woman in Gold is more compelling than it seems from the basic qualities of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s script. Aside from some legal technicalities, it’s a straightforward, plainly told endeavour that would have seemed even blander without their participation. The rest of the cast are used to a much lesser extent, often to the point of appearing in what are mostly cameo roles (McGovern, Pryce, Dance) or in supporting roles that add little to the overall story (Holmes, Irons). But again its the cast who appear in the pre-war scenes (Corduner, Goodman, Traue, Kunzendorf) who come off best, and in particular Maslany as the younger Maria, who exudes a fortitude and an honesty that Mirren reflects with ease.

In the end, as a drama, Woman in Gold isn’t quite as effective as it wants to be, and in places is far too turgid to work properly. As an exploration of one woman’s desire to be repatriated with her family’s possessions it’s moderately engaging, and while the viewer will no doubt sympathise with her plight, this is a David vs Goliath tale that lacks an emotional core to keep the viewer on the edge of the seat, or railing against the impropriety of the Austrian officials. Much of this is due to Curtis’s matter-of-fact directing style, which is unfussy and lacks a level of sophistication that would have improved things immeasurably.

Rating: 6/10 – with two stories intertwined, Woman in Gold suffers from only one of them – and not the main one – being interesting; with a cast that appear to have been encouraged to play down their roles to augment the two leads, this is a movie that stutters to the finish line, and unconvincingly at that.

Oh! the Horror! – Backtrack (2014) and The Last House on Cemetery Lane (2015)

13 Friday Mar 2015

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Backtrack

aka Nazi Vengeance

D: Tom Sands / 97m

Cast: Mark Drake, Sophie Barker, Rosie Akerman, Miles Jovian, Julian Glover

When Ralph (Drake) undergoes past life regression at the suggestion of his friend Claudia (Akerman), he has visions of Nazis in the small English village of Plumpton, and the deaths of an unknown woman and her three children. Confused and upset by this, Ralph manages to persuade his girlfriend, Andrea (Barker), along with Claudia and her boyfriend Lucas (Jovian), to go on a camping trip to the South Downs, and to investigate the area that Ralph saw glimpses of. Finding the village proves more difficult than expected, and while Ralph and Claudia explore further afield, Andrea and Lucas stay with the tents and continue the affair they’ve been having. While in the midst of having sex, an old man knocks Lucas unconscious and threatens Andrea with a shotgun. He ties up both of them and takes them to an old farm building where he tortures them before leaving to find Ralph and Claudia.

Ralph and Claudia return to the tents but don’t immediately realise that their partners have been abducted. Later they do, but by then it’s late and they decide to bed down for the night and go for help in the morning. The old man attempts to grab them but they manage to escape. Having got away, Claudia suggests that Ralph undergo further regression in an effort to find out more about what happened in Plumpton, and if it has any bearing on what’s happening to them now. Ralph learns he was one of the Nazis he saw before, and that he was responsible for the deaths of the woman and her children. He and Claudia seek shelter in a church but the old man is laying in wait for them; they too find themselves held captive with their partners in the old farm building and at the mercy of the old man’s thirst for revenge.

Backtrack - scene

Sometimes, when watching horror films – especially if you’ve seen way too many of them for your own good – there’s often a point where you know exactly what’s going to happen next, and how, and why. This is the feeling you get after the first five minutes of Backtrack, and the feeling persists throughout. For example, when Ralph and Claudia realise their other halves have been abducted, neither of them can make a call on their mobile phones (naturally). Or when Ralph realises he was a Nazi – something the viewer’s known all along. Or when Claudia tells Ralph to keep a Swiss Army knife in his pocket because, you know, it just might come in handy later on. But these examples of lazy storytelling aside, this is a movie that gets it wrong on so many levels it’s almost embarrassing.

While the basic idea of Backtrack is okay for this sort of thing – revenge-driven World War II survivor targets reincarnated souls who killed his family – the movie is defeated from the beginning by some really really really terrible dialogue (think Harrison Ford’s famous quote, “You can type this shit, but you can’t say it”, and you’ll find you’re not even close to how bad the dialogue is). Defeat comes as well through its cast’s complete inability to make the dialogue sound even remotely normal (even Glover, a classically trained actor, can’t do anything with it). And to make matters worse, the cast are uniformly awful, giving amateurish performances and exposing their lack of experience, and lack of knowledge of their craft in every scene.

Stepping away from the world of documentaries for which he’s best known, Sands does a ham-fisted job in every sense, and fails to inject any tension or drama into the proceedings, leaving the cast to fend for themselves and showing no sign that he’s recognised the absurdities of Mick Sands’ apparently first draft script (the old man stalks the two couples by tractor, one that must have the biggest muffler in the world attached to it, as it doesn’t make a sound). With basic attempts at framing and composition, and the feeling that a lot of shots were first takes, the look and feel of Backtrack is that of a movie that should have had a lot more attention paid to it at all stages of its production.

Rating: 1/10 – dire in every way possible, Backtrack is an object lesson in how not to make a low budget horror movie; if the choice is watching this or watching paint dry, then watch the paint – at least it’s got a more credible story arc.

 

Last House on Cemetery Lane, The

D: Andrew Jones / 81m

Cast: Lee Bane, Georgina Blackledge, Tessa Wood, Vivien Bridson

When screenwriter John Davies (Bane) rents a house for a couple of months in order to work on his latest screenplay, he finds there’s a sitting tenant up on the third floor: a blind old lady (Bridson) who never leaves her room. Annoyed at first because there was no mention of the old lady in the advertisement he saw, John is reassured by the estate agent (Wood) that it won’t interfere with his work. He spends a day or so visiting the nearby town and reminiscing on the visits he made to the area as a child. Then, one day, he meets a young woman, Cassie (Blackledge) in the garden. She apologises for being there, but John is unconcerned and, slightly smitten, tells her she can visit again if she wants to.

As his relationship with Cassie develops into something more romantic, John begins to have nightmares and experience strange phenomena. At night, a record player comes on and plays the same song each time. A doll in one of the bedrooms is found on the stairs, and a picture that hangs in the hallway ends up on the floor without being touched. He contacts the estate agent to see if the house has a history, but she says there’s nothing to tell. Cassie suggests using a ouija board, but John rejects the idea – at first. One night he uses one to find out if anything has happened in the past, and it tells him that there was a murder there. Convinced that the old lady must know what’s going on, he visits her, only to find that nothing is quite as it seems, and that his life is now in danger.

Cemetery Lane

With the look and feel of a short movie expanded to meet the needs of a full-length feature, The Last House on Cemetery Lane contains a lot of padding and a shortage of actual drama. The first twenty minutes contain enough off-putting moments to make even die-hard horror fans tune out from boredom, and though the introduction of the blind old lady adds a bit of mystery to proceedings, John’s walk through the nearest town, and then along the beach (accompanied on the soundtrack by a trenchant piece of AOR) seems almost like a test: if you can endure this, then the rest of the movie will be a piece of cake (or a walk on said beach). And even though writer/director Jones begins throwing the odd bit of supernatural phenomena into the mix, the movie finds itself focusing on John and Cassie’s relationship instead, subjecting the viewer to mildly interesting scenes where they get to know each other and trade inane lines of dialogue.

It’s not until John consults the ouija board that the movie begins to pick up pace and reminds itself as to why it’s here. The old lady’s revelations, though, prove less than original and lead to a violent showdown that borrows from Halloween (1978) for a key moment, and which lacks any real tension thanks to the clumsy way in which it’s shot and edited. And with a clear resolution to the tale, the script then undermines and ignores its own logic, both insulting itself and the patient viewer. With so much going on that lacks adequate attention from Jones, it’s left to Bane to carry the bulk of the movie, and while he’s worked with Jones on several previous occasions, even he can’t help the viewer along when the going becomes dull.

A haunted house mystery where the real mystery is why the movie was ever produced, Jones’ strives for atmosphere but misses it by a mile, and never develops his own tale beyond its mundane opening scene. There’s the germ of a good movie here, but Jones and his crew can’t quite get a grip on it.

Rating: 3/10 – only occasionally intriguing, The Last House on Cemetery Lane is a throwback to the kind of rural thrillers made in the Seventies, but without any energy or attempts at effective pacing; with a score that’s more irritating than eerie (not to mention too loud in places), any pleasure to be had will come from its brevity, and its brevity alone.

Unbroken (2014)

26 Thursday Feb 2015

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Unbroken

D: Angelina Jolie / 137m

Cast: Jack O’Connell, Domhnall Gleeson, Miyavi, Garrett Hedlund, Finn Wittrock, Jai Courtney, Luke Treadaway, C.J. Valleroy

As a young child, Louis “Louie” Zamperini (Valleroy) is always getting into trouble, whether it’s through stealing or drinking. He’s also bullied at school because of his Italian roots. One day he’s caught looking up women’s dresses from beneath the bleachers at a track meet. He makes a run for it which is witnessed by his older brother, Pete. Realising how fast Louie can run, Pete decides to train him to be a runner. Louie earns a name for himself and as a young man (O’Connell) is chosen to represent the US at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He does well and sets a record for running the final lap of the 5000 metre race.

In 1943, Louie is a bombardier in the United States Army Air Force, stationed in the Pacific. On a search and rescue mission, his plane crashes into the ocean, leaving himself and two of his crew, Phil (Gleeson) and Mac (Wittrock), adrift in two inflatable rafts. Fighting off starvation and the attention of marauding sharks, they survive as a trio until the thirty-third day when Mac dies. On the forty-seventh day Louie and Phil are rescued by a Japanese military ship. Now prisoners of war they’re initially interrogated for information about the Allies and then transferred to separate P.O.W. camps. Louie ends up at a camp in Tokyo that is overseen by Corporal Mutsuhito “Bird” Watanabe (Miyavi). Watanabe makes a point of mistreating Louie, partly because of his fame as an Olympian, and partly out of jealousy.

Louis is given the opportunity to make a radio broadcast that will be heard in the US. He’s able to reassure his family that he’s alive, but when he’s asked to make a second broadcast that’s critical of the US, he refuses. Sent back to the camp, Watanabe makes all the other prisoners line up and punch Louie in the face as a punishment for not making the broadcast. Two years pass. Watanabe is promoted and leaves the camp, much to Louie’s relief. But when the camp is damaged in a bombing raid by US planes, the prisoners are moved to another camp where it transpires that Watanabe is in charge. Watanabe’s mistreatment of Louie continues, until one day when Louie’s resilience and inner strength lead to Watanabe being embarrassed in front of his men and the rest of the P.O.W.s.

Unbroken - scene

Adapted from the book Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand, Angelina Jolie’s directorial debut is a sincere yet curiously dull affair that never quite engages the viewer, despite its obviously worthy subject matter. Zamperini’s plight was horrendous and yet this is a surprisingly sanitised version of events, with only Watanabe’s bouts of cruelty giving the movie any edge (it’s a strange movie that makes the viewer want to see more abuse in order to make it more involving).

This is partly to do with the script – a combination of drafts and rewrites carried out by William Nicholson, Richard LaGravenese and Joel and Ethan Coen – and the directorial decisions made by Jolie. The script does a good job in reflecting Louie’s life as a child, and it’s these early scenes that have the greatest impact, with their nostalgic appreciation for an earlier, more innocent time. Jolie paints these scenes in a rosy hue and quickly establishes a mood for the movie that the audience can appreciate as being straightforward and unfussy. But once Louie is adrift on the ocean it’s where things begin to unravel, and the movie loses traction. The drama begins to leak out of the movie just as it should start to be truly engrossing, and nothing Jolie does from then on ever comes close to retrieving it.

Once Louie arrives at the P.O.W. camp and encounters Watanabe, Unbroken settles into a predictable series of abusive moments that give O’Connell repeated chances to adequately display Louie’s agony and suffering, and Miyavi the chance to impart a degree of homoerotic self-loathing. There’s a surprising lack of tension to these scenes, and Jolie’s direction of them seems to be carried out at a distance, as if her respect for the material is stopping her from taking any risks. As a result, the audience becomes more of a spectator than a participant and the movie becomes unrewarding.

The movie isn’t helped either by some annoying inconsistencies. After spending forty-seven days adrift at sea, Louie and Phil’s physical deterioration is persuasively shown in a scene where they’re made to strip naked (Gleeson looks really awful). And yet it’s all undone by their carefully groomed facial hair – or lack of it – and equal lack of sunburn. It all contributes to the idea that what Jolie is going for is war-lite, a diffusion of the horrors that really happened, and while this isn’t a bad idea per se – we don’t always need to see just how bad things actually were – here it’s as if she’s taken basic notions of heroism and courage and made them more about stoicism and acceptance.

Unfortunately as well, Jolie fails to raise her cast’s performances above the level of satisfactory, with only Miyavi making any impression, his bland mask of a face hiding a dangerous sadism that seems to pain him as much as it pleases him. In contrast, O’Connell’s rise to international stardom takes a stumble. It’s not his fault, he’s just not given much to work with other than “look worried, look despairing, and grimace in pain”. With these constraints in place, he looks stranded at times, as if he knows he should be giving more but has been instructed not to.

Despite all this, there are some good things about the movie, not the least of which is Alexandre Desplat’s emotive, intimate score, and Roger Deakins’ Oscar nominated cinematography. The former is one of the composer’s best works in recent years and lifts the movie out of the doldrums with ease, and unobtrusively as well. Deakins is a master of lighting and mood, and he has an instinctive way of placing the camera, which helps Jolie’s pedestrian approach tremendously. Together, these two elements give the movie a boost it would have missed out on altogether.

Rating: 5/10 – lacking passion and drive, Unbroken is a dull, ponderous affair that is a less than rewarding experience for the viewer; as a tribute to Louis Zamperini’s fortitude and spirit, it could certainly have been more dramatic, but as a (very) low-key examination of one man’s will to survive it fares slightly better.

Ida (2013)

08 Sunday Feb 2015

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MCDIDAA EC008

D: Pawel Pawlikowski / 82m

Cast: Agata Kulesza, Agata Trzebuchowska, Dawid Ogrodnik, Jerzy Trela, Adam Szyszkowski, Halina Skoczynska

Poland, the early Sixties. Anna (Trzebuchowska) is a novitiate nun at a convent in the countryside. She has an aunt, Wanda Gruz (Kulesza), who is her only living relative; before Anna takes her vows, the Mother Superior (Skoczynska) advises her that she should visit her. She goes to the city where she finds her aunt is well off through her work as a judge (she’s also an alcoholic who enjoys one night stands). She isn’t there very long when Wanda tells Anna that she’s Jewish and her real name is Ida; also that her parents are killed during the war. At first, Anna doesn’t believe her, but Wanda shows her some photos, including those of a little boy, and tells her that her mother was very artistic.

Anna wants to visit their graves but Wanda tells her that no one knows where they are buried. Anna persists in wanting to find them. She and her aunt travel to her parents’ home in order to begin their search. There, Wanda speaks to the current owner, Feliks (Szyszkowski), looking for the whereabouts of the man’s father, Szymon (Trela), who lived there during the war, and who was sheltering Anna’s parents. Szymon is in hospital, so Wanda and Anna travel to see him. Along the way they pick up a hitchhiker, Lis (Ogrodnik), a sax player heading to play a gig in the same town; there is an immediate attraction between him and Anna. When they visit Szymon he tells them nothing.

However, Feliks turns up at their hotel room and promises to show them where the bodies are buried, but only if Anna signs away all rights to the house and the land. She agrees. He takes them straight to a wooded area where he begins to dig until bones start to appear. There are three bodies in all: Anna’s parents and the little boy from the photos who proves to be Wanda’s son. Feliks confesses to having killed them all, but leaving Anna at a local church as she could pass for Christian. Anna and Wanda take the bones and bury them in a nearby Jewish cemetery.

Anna decides to return to the convent, but her exposure to the outside world has filled her with doubts about becoming a nun. She leaves again and heads back to the city, partly to test her faith and partly to attend an unexpected funeral.

Ida - scene

An austere, rigorously shot movie in starkly beautiful black and white, Ida is one of the most powerful movies of recent years. There is a tangible layer of history that seeps through the narrative, colouring the actions of Wanda, and making its effects known at all times. Poland lost a fifth of its population during World War II – including three million Jews – and this terrible statistic is hinted at in the fate of Anna’s parents, their remains recovered but unlike so many buried in unmarked graves across the country. Using this as a backdrop to the main storyline, Pawlikowski and co-screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz, have fashioned a compelling, disturbing movie whose emotional undertones are never far from the surface, and when they do break through, have a devastating effect.

The movie also maintains a strict, religious overtone, Anna’s faith tested on several levels but always giving her the strength to carry on. Trzebuchowska (a devout atheist in real life) gives a magnificent performance as Anna, her pale gaze appearing like a blank canvas with nothing to reveal, but it’s her eyes that always tell you how she’s feeling, seeming at times to be looking at something far away and yet as close to her as to be touching. It’s a quiet, well-modulated performance, the movie’s backbone and its source of inquiry as well, as Anna’s exposure to the horrors of the past and the pleasures of the present help inform the audience of the wider issues the movie deals with.

She’s matched by Kulesza’s angry, demoralised Wanda, a cog in the wheel of the state system who once prosecuted Poles who resisted the Nazis, and now finds herself leading a solitary, unfulfilling life accompanied by the lingering loss of her son. Wanda’s reluctance at first to help Anna find her parents is understandable given that she already knows what she’ll find. It also makes her anger and lack of compassion for others all the more reasonable, and Kulesza treads a very careful path between Wanda being unlikeable and sympathetic, making her a credible mixture of both. As both women make their journey into the past, it becomes all too clear that Wanda’s strength and determination are all too hollow.

Those viewers with a penchant for European arthouse compositions will be enthralled by Ida, its sense of space highlighted by the many scenes where the characters are anchored firmly to the bottom of the screen, or pressed into one corner, while vast expanses tower over them. Anyone familiar with Polish movies from the early Sixties will be impressed by the way that Pawlikowski and cinematographers Łukasz Żal and Ryszard Lenczewski have emulated the filming style of that time, and the way in which scenes are shot in such a way as to prove a little intimidating or uncomfortable. This, combined with the often spartan quality of the black and white images, makes the movie a constant joy to engage with, although the casual viewer might not be aware of the design and its planned execution.

In throwing some light on events that happened in Poland over seventy years ago, and how its legacy was still being felt nearly twenty years on, Pawlikowski has put together a movie that is breathtaking in its simplicity and timeless in its subject matter. It’s a welcome return to form after the serious misstep that was The Woman in the Fifth (2011), and is an impressive reminder that the Polish movie maker is one of the most innovative and compelling directors working today.

Rating: 9/10 – beneath its bleak yet elegant exterior, Ida is an emotionally charged masterpiece that is enthralling, bold and intensely complex; with two powerful central performances, it’s a triumph for Pawlikowski, and is without doubt one of the finest movies of 2013.

Memory of the Camps (1945/1984)

27 Tuesday Jan 2015

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Memory of the Camps

Original title: German Concentration Camps Factual Survey

No director / 58m

Narrator: Trevor Howard

Compiled from footage shot by combat and newsreel cameramen, Memory of the Camps was meant to be shown to German prisoners of war as a caustic reminder of the atrocities committed by the Nazis. Thanks to problems connected with post-war shortages and international cooperation, the movie’s assembly foundered and with two other, completed, documentaries released in the meantime – along with a change in policy that led to the authorities feeling such a project was now inappropriate – it’s only screening was in rough cut form in September 1945 (and without a working title).

Plans to revisit the movie in 1946 failed to happen and in 1952 the footage was “inherited” by London’s Imperial War Museum. It wasn’t until the early Eighties that anyone looked at the various reels and realised the importance of the material. As a result the five reel rough cut was shown at the 1984 Berlin Film Festival – with the added title Memory of the Camps – and then in 1985 on the PBS Network in the US with Howard’s narration added. (In 2015 an expanded, restored version with additional modern day footage titled Night Will Fall was shown as part of the Holocaust remembrance events surrounding 27 January, the date when Auschwitz was liberated by the Russians.)

The movie is a straightforward, no-holds-barred piece of cinema verité, unflinching in its depiction of the depravity carried out at fourteen locations (ten camps and four sites of atrocity) and beginning with Belsen-Bergen. The film that was shot then and the images that were recorded are heartbreaking, with hundreds of sick and emaciated internees struggling to comprehend the change in their fortunes or too far gone to understand it at all. Inevitably, there are the bodies, thousands of them everywhere, unattended, cadavers made of skin and bone, their faces like stretched parchment. The sheer scope and number of the deceased is difficult to comprehend, each pile of bodies looking like the worst example you’ll see… until the next one.

The Allies – mostly the British – are shown providing much-needed aid and comfort, but the bodies are the greater problem, their decomposition providing a fertile breeding ground for typhus and delaying the dispersal of the internees from the camps. In an ironic (and possibly contemptuous) turn of events, the Allies made the camp guards do most of the disposal work, getting them to handle the corpses and fill the mass graves with them. Shot so dispassionately at the time, this particular footage is harrowing to watch, as decomposing body after decomposing body is carried, or in some cases dragged along, to the pits that will be their final resting places.

Memory of the Camps - scene

The movie stays at Bergen-Belsen for some time, relaying the extent of the horror perpetrated there and the wretched conditions the inmates endured. It shows us the gas ovens, the infrastructure that made it all happen, and the survivors venting their anger on the guards and lackeys who had so recently tormented them. By the time the movie leaves Belsen-Bergen the viewer is so shell-shocked there’s a danger that footage from the rest of the camps – including Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Majdanek – won’t be as distressing, but nothing could be further from the truth. Each camp throws up its own unique horrors, and each visit adds to the mounting, inescapable conclusion that the Nazis’ Final Solution should never be downplayed or allowed to fade from memory.

Overseen by producer Sidney Bernstein, Memory of the Camps was meant to be the movie to be shown to German POW’s after the war. It was a prestige production, with Bernstein calling on the likes of Alfred Hitchcock to assist on the project – Hitchcock gave advice on how the footage should be assembled – as well as future British cabinet minister Richard Crossman to work on the commentary. Despite the setbacks it suffered, and even in its rough cut form, the movie is still incredibly powerful even today, and carries a horrible weight that reinforces the importance of its content. There are dozens of close ups of the faces of the unknown dead, each one a sad reminder of the millions of people who not only lost their lives but who will never be remembered.

Howard’s narration is a masterpiece of studied melancholy, his normally rich tones subdued by the details he has to recite. There are moments where he pauses for a second or two, not so much for deliberate effect (the movie doesn’t need any help in that department) but more out of a recognition that what he’s saying is almost beyond belief. The movie also includes long stretches where Howard remains silent and the images speak for themselves. When these silent passages occur, leaving the viewer alone with the horrors on screen and their own thoughts, it’s almost a relief when Howard resumes his narrative.

Good as Howard’s voice over is however, it’s still the visuals that carry the most weight, acting like random gut punches and leaving the viewer overwhelmed by their barbarity and callousness. With more recent acts of genocide having appeared on our TV screens it’s disturbing that the shameful acts carried out by the Nazis can still have such an effect on people over seventy years on. But in a strange way, that’s a good thing…

Rating: 9/10 – even in its incomplete form, Memory of the Camps is a gruelling, crushing reminder of how callously and deliberately the Nazis exterminated an astonishing eighteen million people; traumatic to watch, but if it wasn’t then its message would be lost completely, and that would be as unacceptable as the camps themselves.

For all the nameless victims who should never be forgotten.

The Imitation Game (2014)

11 Sunday Jan 2015

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Imitation Game, The

D: Morten Tyldum / 114m

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Rory Kinnear, Allen Leech, Matthew Beard, Charles Dance, Mark Strong, James Northcote, Tom Goodman-Hill, Steven Waddington, Alex Lawther, Jack Bannon, Tuppence Middleton

Manchester, 1951. A robbery at the home of maths professor Alan Turing (Cumberbatch) leads to the police, particularly Detective Robert Nock (Kinnear), having suspicions that he is hiding something.

1939. Turing arrives for a job interview at Bletchley Park. He is aloof, humourless, arrogant, and quickly stirs the ire of his interviewer, Naval Commander Denniston (Dance). On the verge of being thrown out because of his behaviour, Turing mentions Enigma, the “unbreakable” encryption device being used by the Germans; if it can be cracked, it will turn the tide of the war in Britain’s favour. Impressed, but still against his better judgment, Denniston hires Turing. He becomes part of a team that is headed by chess prodigy Hugh Alexander (Goode), and includes cryptographers John Cairncross (Leech) and Peter Hilton (Beard), though there is friction from the start as Turing prefers to work alone; instead of trying to decipher the hundreds of messages they intercept each day in the hope of breaking the code, Turing works at constructing a machine that will be able to analyse and decode the 159 million million million possible settings the Enigma machine uses.

Denied the funds to build his machine by Alexander, Turing approaches Denniston but is rebuffed. He gets a letter to Winston Churchill via MI6 overseer Stewart Menzies (Strong) and ends up in charge of the programme at Bletchley Park. He fires part of the team but then realises they need more staff. He has a difficult crossword puzzle published in the newspapers; anyone who solves it is asked to attend a further test/interview at Bletchley. Through this he meets Joan Clarke (Knightley), who proves to be a match for him intellectually, and despite some resistance from her parents, he arranges for her to work on the project.

1951. Nock gains a copy of Turing’s military file, only to find there’s nothing in it. He tells his superior, Superintendent Smith (Waddington) that he believes Turing could be a Communist spy. Smith allows Nock to investigate further.

1940. Turing arrives at the hut the team uses to find Denniston and some MPs going through his desk. Apparently there is a spy at Bletchley, but the search reveals nothing out of the ordinary, though Denniston makes it clear his suspicions lie firmly with Turing. Tensions between the group are heightened as Turing spends more and more time building his machine and isolating himself. Joan tells him he needs to be more friendly otherwise he won’t get the help he needs. He does so, and a little while later receives a suggestion from Alexander that is beneficial. A confrontation between Turing and Denniston leads to the rest of the team backing him and his machine (against the threat of being fired); Denniston tells them they have a month to prove it works.

With the month nearly up and no progress made with the machine (named Christopher after Turing’s schoolboy friend), Turing finds himself talking to Helen (Middleton), one of Joan’s friends, and someone who intercepts the German messages. She reveals that her German counterpart always uses the same phrase in their messages. It proves to be the breakthrough Turing and the team have needed. Now, instead of searching through all the possible settings, Christopher only has to search for ones that contain words that they know will be in the messages. They test their theory… and it works. But that isn’t the end of it, and a terrible decision has to be made. And in 1951, Nock discovers that what Turing is trying to hide isn’t that he’s a Communist spy, but that he’s a homosexual.

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There are two things that can be said about Alan Turing: that without him the Germans could well have won the war, and the circumstances of his post-war life led to a terrible tragedy. It’s to The Imitation Game‘s credit that it explores these aspects of his life with both candour and a lack of sentimentality. Exploring for the most part his work at Bletchley Park, the movie doesn’t ignore his formative years, nor the events that led to his untimely death in 1954, but its the way in which each part of his life is integrated that makes the movie so effective. The different periods dovetail with precision, Graham Moore’s intelligent, well-constructed screenplay – albeit one that contains a great deal of invention (the character of Nock and his investigation for example) – picking out the highs and lows of Turing’s life with exemplary attention to detail.

The importance of Turing’s work during the war can’t be stressed enough; historians have gauged that breaking the Enigma code shortened the war by at least two years. The size of the problem, the sheer enormity of it all, is given due importance, and the various setbacks add to the tension, but it’s the movie’s focus on Turing and his team that adds immeasurably to the drama. Turing is portrayed as an arrogant boor, dismissive of anyone less intelligent than himself (and that’s most people), and so single-minded in his pursuit of a solution to the Enigma code that his arrogance increases tenfold. His interaction with Alexander is initially antagonistic, but the growing respect they gain for each other is handled with care and sincerity, and brings Turing out of his shell. As well there’s his relationship with Joan, as unlikely a collaboration as could be imagined during the war, but as richly rewarding for each other as it is for the viewer (and beautifully played by Cumberbatch and Knightley).

Turing is brought to life by an amazing performance from Cumberbatch, immersing himself completely in the role and proving mesmerising to watch. Moore’s script allows for a lot of humour in the movie’s early scenes, mostly at the expense of Turing’s humourlessness (and Denniston’s apprehension at his behaviour). Both actors relish their sharp, witty dialogue, and while it all helps to make Turing more sympathetic than he would be otherwise, it also serves to introduce the Enigma project in such a way that the seriousness of the situation, when it becomes more pronounced, doesn’t leave the audience missing the humour. And the drama reaches a peak in a scene where the terrible consequences of cracking the code means a heart-rending decision has to be made that affects Hilton’s brother. It’s a chilling moment, with victory swiftly replaced by despair, and perfectly highlights some of the difficult decisions that have to be made during wartime.

In terms of biographical continuity, the movie flits between 1926, the war and 1951. Turing’s time at Sherborne School, where his friendship with Christopher Morcom leads to the first intimation of his homosexuality, is given weight by the later use of “Christopher” as the name of the code-breaking machine. It also paints a rather amiable picture of boarding school life and shows the younger Turing struggling to come to terms with his own emotions and the love he feels for his friend. These scenes are the equivalent of the kind of rosy childhood memories we all think we experienced but which in actuality were probably worse than we remember, but they serve as a way of showing how disappointment and regret have allowed the older Turing to become so haughty and withdrawn. The post-war sequences, almost entirely invented for the movie, give a passing hint at how Turing may have died but then states at the end that he committed suicide, which was the official cause of death at the time, but which has since been revealed to be not entirely conclusive.

It’s these distortions and fabrications of the historical period that, inevitably, do the most harm to the movie, and while a degree of dramatic licence is to be expected in a drama “based” on true events, the range and number of historical inaccuracies is worrying.  In truth, Turing was not as disliked as the movie shows, and he did have a recognised sense of humour. He didn’t lead the team at Bletchley Park, nor did he write a letter to Churchill asking for funds to build his machine (which in reality had already been designed in 1938 by Marian Rejewski, a Polish cryptographer). Clarke’s involvement was not as pronounced as shown in the movie, and Hilton had no brother, while the character of Helen is entirely fictional too. It’s understandable that these aspects of Moore’s script are there to enhance the drama, but when you have a true story of wartime heroics to tell, the need for such embellishments – or falsehoods if you will – seems unnecessary. And Turing’s homosexuality, while not overplayed, is treated somewhat like an unfortunate character trait, with everyone at Bletchley aware of it but ever so respectful at the same time – one wonders if that would really have been the case.

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Despite issues with the script, the cast are uniformly excellent. As mentioned above, Cumberbatch is mesmerising, portraying Turing’s strength of will and sense of purpose with such skill and confidence that the character’s quirks and odd physicality seem entirely natural. He dominates every scene he’s in, causing his co-stars to up their game considerably; as a result The Imitation Game contains a raft of performances that are so good it may well be the best acted movie of 2014. Knightley is appealing as Joan (even if she bears no resemblance to the real Joan Clarke), and plays her with a determination and inner strength that matches Turing’s irascibility and overcomes it. Goode, Leech and Beard, as Turing’s main collaborators, all get their chance to shine but it’s their group scenes and their interaction with each other that work best. Kinnear has an awkward role that he copes well with, as a detective representing our modern approach to the adversity that Turing suffered after the war; it’s the one role that doesn’t entirely convince and seems shoehorned into the movie to make the point about how badly Turing – a war hero – was treated after hostilities ceased. And Dance and Strong, as the twin faces of the Establishment, provide effortless support throughout (as you’d expect).

Fresh from his adaptation of Jo Nesbø’s Headhunters (2011), Tyldum displays an appreciation for recent British history, and handles the complexities of the story in such a way that nothing seems too intellectual to understand. He keeps the action very contained, focusing instead on the characters and their personalities, showing how people from often very different backgrounds could, and did, make such a vital difference in how the war was eventually won. The various periods of Turing’s are recreated with admirable authenticity (some wartime scenes were actually shot at Bletchley Park), and are lensed to very good effect by Oscar Faura. There’s also a subtly evocative score by Alexandre Desplat that enriches each scene it plays over or supports.

Rating: 9/10 – despite taking a huge number of historical liberties, The Imitation Game is gripping, thought-provoking, ambitious movie making, and one of the finest dramas of recent years; with stellar performances from all concerned – including Cumberbatch’s career-defining turn – this (mostly) true story scales new heights in the genre of historical drama, and can’t be recommended highly enough.

The Woman in Black: Angel of Death (2014)

07 Wednesday Jan 2015

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Woman in Black Angel of Death, The

D: Tom Harper / 98m

Cast: Phoebe Fox, Jeremy Irvine, Helen McCrory, Oaklee Prendergast, Adrian Rawlins, Ned Dennehy, Amelia Crouch, Amelia Pidgeon, Casper Allpress, Pip Pearce, Leilah de Meza, Jude Wright, Alfie Simmons, Leanne Best

London, 1941. The Blitz has caused the evacuation of several schoolchildren along with their headmistress, Jean Hogg (McCrory) and their teacher, Eve Parkins (Fox). As they take the train to their destination of Crythin Gifford, Eve shares a compartment with RAF pilot Harry Burnstow who is on his way to a new posting at a nearby airfield. Met by local air raid warden Dr Rhodes (Rawlins), he takes them through the now deserted village where the bus has a puncture. While it’s repaired, Eve encounters a blind man, Jacob (Dennehy) who warns her that she and the children will never escape “her”.

At Eel Marsh House, the two women and their charges settle in. Eve has a bad dream that leads to her seeing a woman dressed all in black (Best). The figure vanishes, but the next day, one of the children, Edward (Prendergast), who has been mute since the death of his parents in an air raid, is locked in the nursery by two other children, and sees the woman in black. Afterwards, Edward carries a tattered doll around with him. That night, one of the boys who locked him in the nursery is led from the house by the woman in black; the next morning he’s found dead.

Another sighting of the woman in black in a graveyard leads Eve to discover her identity and the sad history of her child, Nathaniel. With Eve becoming even more convinced that they are all in danger, she battles to convince Jean that they should all leave as soon as possible. An air raid sees the woman in black claim another victim, and with the aid of Harry, they head for the airfield where he’s based. While they wait for the morning to come, Edward is spirited away back to Eel Marsh House. Eve refuses to leave him behind and makes her way back to rescue him.

Woman in Black Angel of Death, The - scene

Set forty years after the events of The Woman in Black (2012), this unnecessary sequel fails to match the quality and all-round scariness of its predecessor, and thanks to a badly constructed screenplay by Jon Croker, almost reduces its titular character to making little more than a cameo appearance.

The success of the original always meant there would be a sequel, and with the decision to set the new story during World War II it seemed as if the makers had come up with an idea that would avoid the usual horror sequel inanity that most follow ups suffer from. Alas, the wartime setting is the only good idea the makers have come up with, and the rest of the movie is as turgid and predictable and run-of-the-mill as any other horror sequel.

With the woman in black’s story told in the first movie, its resurrection here feels like padding in a movie that repeats various shots and sequences in an attempt to promote a sense of menace that never really pays off. Eve has the same nightmare over and over, and while it replays with different outcomes (including a bone-wearying appearance from you-know-who on one occasion), and serves to provide Eve with a back story of her own, the script’s intention for it to be as scary as what’s happening in Eel Marsh House never pans out. Likewise, the oft-repeated shot looking upward at the hole in the ceiling above Edward’s bed – will we glimpse the woman in black there? – is played over and over and becomes tiresome in the extreme.

That a potential franchise has run out of steam so soon may not be surprising to some, but the strength of the original in comparison to this outing is too evident for any other analysis. As a main character, Eve is too blandly presented to have much of an impact, and the viewer has a tough time sympathising with her or her predicament, even when mad, blind Jacob has her temporarily imprisoned. The same goes for the character of Jean, the rationalist who denies the supernatural until it’s literally staring her in the face (and then is all nice and apologetic). Both Fox and McCrory are more than capable actresses, but even with their talents they’re unable to raise their performances above the level of perfunctory. Worse still is Harry, a character so unimaginatively drawn that Irvine is unable to add any colour or flesh him out to an extent that would make him more interesting.

As for Jennet Humpfrye herself, the movie places her firmly in the background, giving her less exposure and as a result, making her less menacing. As a supposedly single-minded, revenge-oriented character she’s remarkably relaxed in her efforts to kill the children placed so conveniently in her home (especially after forty years). And with the change in actress – Best taking over from Liz White – the look and design of the woman in black has been altered somewhat, with Jennet looking younger and less intimidating behind her veil. It’s a sign that not all’s well, that the movie’s primary source of scares and shocks is not as effectively rendered as before (and perhaps this is why we see so little of her, the makers realising how tame her appearance looks in comparison).

To make matters worse the interiors of Eel Marsh House are gloomily lit and make it difficult to see what’s going on when the action takes place at night, while the exteriors are equally bleak and forlorn. It’s all done for the sake of atmosphere but makes the movie an unappealing viewing experience nevertheless. Orchestrating it all, Harper forgets to imbue the movie with a sense of credible peril, and one jump scare aside, defaults on the terror as well. It all leads to an ending that is rushed and dramatically unsatisfactory, and reinforces the feeling that the makers could have done a whole lot better.

Rating: 4/10 – a movie that plays at being scary but doesn’t deliver, The Woman in Black: Angel of Death aims high but succeeds only in being mediocre; a poor effort by all concerned, and one that (hopefully) will discourage a further movie from being made.

The Lady in No 6 (2014)

07 Friday Nov 2014

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Lady in No 6, The

aka: The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life

D: Malcolm Clarke / 39m

Alice Herz-Sommer

Born in Prague in 1903, Alice Herz grew up surrounded by the intelligentsia of the day, her parents’ cultural salon frequented by the likes of Franz Kafka (who would go for walks with Aiice and her twin sister, Mariana, and tell them stories) and Gustav Mahler. She learnt to play the piano at an early age and was encouraged to take it up as a career by another friend of the family, Artur Schnabel.  She studied at the prestigious Prague German Conservatory of Music (where she was the youngest pupil), and there drew the attention of cellist Leopold Sommer.  They married in 1931, and in 1937 had a son, Raphael.  Alice gave recitals and performed in concerts until the Nazis took control of Prague and Jewish involvement in performances was curtailed.  While several of her family members and friends fled to Israel, Alice remained in Prague to care for her mother who was very ill.

In July 1943, Alice was arrested and sent to Theresienstadt where her skills as a pianist were utilised in over one hundred concert performances, including those for the visiting Red Cross, as the Nazis strove to show that conditions were not as bad as the Allies suspected.  Billeted with Raphael, he and Alice were liberated in 1945 (sadly, Leopold died of typhus in Dachau six weeks before it too was liberated).  Rebuilding her life, she and Raphael emigrated to Israel in 1949 and were reunited with their family, including Mariana.  There, Alice worked as a teacher at the Jerusalem Academy of Music until she decided to emigrate to England in 1986.  In retirement she still played the piano for three hours every day, and remained an inspiration to everyone who knew her.  Remarkably, she was a hundred and ten when she died in February 2014.

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The key to Alice’s life, she always said, was optimism.  She unfailingly looked for the good in life, even during the terrible years when she and Raphael were incarcerated in Theresienstadt.  Like so many of her fellow concentration camp survivors – two of whom are featured in the movie – Alice’s positive attitude helped her to withstand the horror that surrounded her.  She saw “the beauty in life” in almost everything, but particularly in music.  For Alice, “music was magic”.  It could raise her spirits and bring happiness in even the most terrible of situations or circumstances.  With her unwavering memory for classical pieces, Alice could always retreat into her own mind, a place where even the Nazis couldn’t follow her.  It’s inspiring to think that, despite where she was, she was perhaps freer than anyone could imagine.

This remarkable woman is the focus of an equally remarkable documentary short.  The Lady in No 6 is a compelling, fascinating account of one woman’s lifelong love affair with music.  Alice is seen at 109, still mobile, still playing the piano with wonderful dexterity, and still enjoying life with a vitality and energy that would put most thirty-somethings to shame.  She’s always smiling and laughing, and her eyes – only slightly dulled by old age – twinkle with a mixture of mirth and sincerity that is surprisingly wistful when she sits in repose.  Alice’s upbeat nature and lack of pessimism is a joy to behold, and when she talks about her love of music you can see that she’s transported by it.  As she’s said in the past, “I am Jewish, but Beethoven is my religion”.

Wisely focusing on her passion for music for the most part – with an extended but emotive sidestep into World War II – Clarke deftly avoids any hint of sentimentality (as does Alice) and paints an engaging, winning portrait of a woman whose devotion to music has the effect of making the viewer wish they had even a tenth of Alice’s ability and commitment to her art.  Testimony from one of her neighbours provides an idea of how much her morning recitals are enjoyed, and a reminiscence of her time at Theresienstadt reveals the same approval from some of the guards.  It’s a wonderful affirmation of Alice and her dedication to her muse, that her playing has been able to cross social and ideological divides with such incredible efficacy.

Away from Alice and her contagious love affair with classical music, the movie paints a sobering yet hope-infused account of her time at Theresienstadt, with one of her friends recounting a particularly chilling account of an encounter with Josef Mengele.  The focus shifts to take into account the resilience of those inmates who could see no other outcome but their own survival, and while Alice takes a back seat during these moments, it still serves to highlight the tenacity she must have had to endure (and to be so well-balanced in the aftermath of it all).

Visually as well, The Lady in No 6 is a treat, with Clarke’s assembly of various archival materials proving both eye-catching and memorable, his blending of the historical and the modern throwing each element into sharp relief.  The post-production work is highly impressive, and so is the editing by co-writer Carl Freed, both of such a high standard that the movie has a precise, almost painterly feel to it, and the scenes of Alice in her flat feel entirely welcoming, not as if the audience is eavesdropping on her, but that she’s gladly invited everyone in… and couldn’t be more pleased for the intrusion.

Rating: 9/10 – a delightful and inspiring look at the life of an absolutely exceptional woman, The Lady in No 6 fully deserves its Oscar win and is one of the best documentary short movies of recent years; it’s a shame then that we get to spend such a short amount of time in Alice’s wonderful company.

Phoenix (2014)

02 Sunday Nov 2014

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Phoenix

D: Christian Petzold / 98m

Cast: Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, Nina Kunzendorf, Michael Maertens, Imogen Kogge

Nelly (Hoss) is a former nightclub singer who was interned in a concentration camp during World War II and subsequently disfigured.  At the war’s end she undergoes reconstructive surgery that makes her look as close as possible to her real self.  The resemblance is striking but there are enough differences that she could be mistaken for someone else.  Nelly recovers from her surgery with the help of fellow survivor, Lene (Kunzendorf).  When Nelly is better, Lene wants both of them to emigrate to Israel, but Nelly has other ideas: she wants to return to Berlin and find her husband, Johnny (Zehrfeld).

Her search takes her to the Phoenix club, where she finds Johnny, but there is no happy reunion.  When he sees her, Johnny doesn’t recognise her, but he does see the resemblance and comes up with a plan to claim Nelly’s inheritance.  After a period in which he will teach her to “be” Nelly, he will present her to their families and friends, and pass her off as his wife.  Nelly goes along with the plan.  She keeps quiet about her identity in the hope that Johnny will one day recognise her, but those hopes are cruelly dashed when Lene learns that Johnny was the person who deposed her to the authorities and which led to her being taken to the concentration camp (and then divorced her the day after).

Upset by this news, Nelly becomes ambivalent towards Johnny and begins to question his plan and its chances of succeeding.  She drops hints about her true identity but he doesn’t pick up on them.  She challenges him and makes things more difficult for him when he tries to tell her about their past, questioning what he tells her.  She also changes the way she is asked to dress and behave, subtly altering the balance of power in their relationship.  As the time approaches when Nelly is due to “return”, she must make the decision to either reveal the truth, or go along with the deception.

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A mordant, austere tale about one woman’s attempt to reconstruct her life and reconnect with her past, but under unexpected conditions, Phoenix is the sixth collaboration between Petzold and Hoss, and a great example of contemporary German cinema.

Adapted by Petzold from the novel Return from the Ashes by Hubert Monteilhet, Phoenix is a quietly gripping examination of memory and identity, and the ways in which each can undermine the other.  From the movie’s beginning, with Nelly about to undergo the surgery she hopes will give her her life back, it’s clear that she has lost more than just her looks.  She’s lost her sense of self, and by looking as much as possible as she did – and not differently as recommended by her surgeon – she has faith that this will restore her.  But what is really missing is the self-confidence she had before she was interned, and even looking as she did, she’s still hesitant and unsure of herself.

When it comes to actually rebuilding her life with Johnny she doesn’t find it easy, her emotional fragility keeping her subdued and unwilling to jeopardise the duplicitous scheme her ex-husband has come up with.  Being able to do the “role” justice begins to change matters, Nelly slowly gaining in confidence until she is as much in control of Johnny’s scheme as he is – if not more so.  The power play that develops between them adds tension and a deeper emotional complexity than up til now, and as Nelly begins to assert herself – and not the impostor version she’s adopted – her sense of pride develops as well.  The final scene shows just how far Nelly has come, and it’s a rewarding moment both for her and for the viewer (if not for Johnny).

With Nelly finding that Johnny’s memories of their marriage lack any residual warmth or fondness, she also has to come to terms with the idea that her view of their marriage may not be as truthful as she believed.  As she struggles to maintain that wilting perspective, the moment when she puts it all behind her and decides to move forward is put off until the very end, leaving the movie balanced on a cinematic precipice.  Mean-spirited it may be, but whether or not Nelly and Johnny do go back to each other after all their plotting, is largely irrelevant.  That Nelly now has a choice in the decision is what matters, and by the look on Johnny’s face at the end, it’s not a choice he’s looking forward to her making.

As the uncertain, deceptively enigmatic Nelly, Hoss puts in a superb performance, perfectly capturing the various fears, worries and concerns of a person playing a part and slowly learning how empowering it can be.  Hoss is one of the best actresses working in movies today, and she gives a measured, quietly authoritative performance that shows her complete command of the character and her (somewhat skewed) behaviour.  It’s a fantastic achievement, outwardly clinical in that detached manner people expect from German actors, but ruinously emotional underneath, emoting often with just her eyes, her expressionless face hiding the inner turmoil Nelly feels inside.  It’s an acting masterclass, the kind of role that would go to Nicole Kidman if there was an English language remake (though let’s hope there isn’t).

Phoenix Ronald Zehrfeld Nina Hoss

With his lead actress having such firm control over the main character, Petzold is free to highlight the emotional and psychological aspects of his script, keeping “Nelly” hidden away for most of the movie, even when the war is over and she’s forced to hide behind the surgery she’s had.  Petzold (with Hoss’s help of course) brings Nelly to life with painstaking attention to the more poignant aspects of her tale, most notably in a scene where by dressing as she once did Nelly hopes to reignite a spark in Johnny’s heart, that even though he doesn’t feel toward her as he did before the War, that he might do so now, even though she’s different.  It’s an incredibly touching, hopeful moment, beautifully and sensitively acted by Hoss and Zehrfeld, and on its own, one of the most powerful scenes you’re likely to see all year.

The post-war period is effectively replicated and photographed (by Hans Fromm), and there’s a simple but equally effective score by Stefan Will (who has worked on all bar one of Petzold’s movies).  It all adds up to a quietly engrossing tale that makes a virtue of keeping its main characters’ emotions hidden close under the surface, and by making Nelly’s struggle to unite her past and future all the more enthralling.

Rating: 8/10 – at first glance, Phoenix looks gloomy and uninviting, but Petzold is an astute director and the movie is far more passionate than it seems; with another outstanding performance from Hoss, this is a movie that exceeds expectations and does so with honesty and tremendous skill from its makers.

Fury (2014)

30 Thursday Oct 2014

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Fury

D: David Ayer / 134m

Cast: Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña, Jon Bernthal, Jason Isaacs, Jim Parrack, Brad William Henke, Kevin Vance, Xavier Samuel, Anamaria Marinca, Alicia von Rittberg

April 1945, Germany.  A battered, disabled tank lies amidst the carnage of a recently fought battle.  Its men – Collier (Pitt), Swan (LaBeouf), Garcia (Peña), and Travis (Bernthal) – are battle-hardened and weary but they have an unshakeable bond.  Under Collier’s tough, uncompromising leadership they’ve survived countless skirmishes, encounters and battles.  Now, with the war nearing its end, they are all looking forward to peacetime.

Travis gets their tank – named Fury – moving again and they head back to base.  There, much to Collier’s disgust, they are assigned a new driver/gunner, Ellison (Lerman); Collier is disgusted because Ellison is too young, he’s only been in the Army for eight weeks and he knows nothing about tanks.  Introduced to the rest of the crew, Ellison is treated with disdain and told to take a bucket of hot water and clean out the inside of the tank.  When he does, he finds the partial remains of the previous driver/gunner.  Meanwhile, Collier and three other tank commanders are given a mission to meet up with Baker Company and from there take over a small town.

On the way to the rendezvous, Ellison’s inexperience causes the death of several men including the lieutenant (Samuel) who was leading them.  Now led by Collier, the convoy carries on and they meet up with Baker Company and their commanding officer, Captain Waggoner (Isaacs).  Before seizing the town, Waggoner needs the tanks to flush out a German unit that has several dozen US troops pinned down in a field.  Fury and the other tanks get the job done, but Ellison’s inexperience nearly causes more casualties.  When the fight is over, Collier tries to make Ellison kill a captured German soldier, putting a gun in his hand and telling him to “do his job”, which is to kill Nazis.  Ellison refuses but Collier puts his hand over the young man’s hand and pulls the trigger.  Ellison is horrified by it all but it proves to be a turning point, and when the nearby town is taken he is less nervous and is able to despatch the Germans without feeling too sick or nervous.

With the town taken, Collier and Ellison investigate a building where they’ve seen a woman peering from a window.  They find the woman, Irma (Marinca) and her niece Emma (Rittberg).  While Collier washes up, Ellison takes Emma into the bedroom and clearly attracted to each other, they make love.  Later, while the four are about to have a meal, the rest of Fury’s crew barge in and spoil things, before orders are received to report to Captain Waggoner.  He tells Collier and the other tank commanders that there is a nearby crossroads that needs holding because of a large German troop movement that’s heading in that direction.  But on their way there, the tanks find themselves under attack crossing a large field, and very soon the whole mission is in danger of failing.

Fury - scene

After the less than impressive Sabotage (2014), writer/director Ayer returns with a movie that paints a portrait of extreme heroism under one of the most difficult of environments, and with a keen eye for detail that grounds both the action and the characters.  It’s a challenging piece of moviemaking and provides a reminder of just how awful tank warfare could be.

And yet, Fury is a curious mix of the heroic and the mundane.  Ayer’s script paints each man as a distinct individual – Collier as noted above, Swan as religiously minded, Garcia as more carnally oriented, Travis as a bigoted animal, Ellison as a callow liability (at first) – but it doesn’t take the time to explore or delve into those characters any further than those broad brush strokes allow.  Collier speaks fluent German but the reason for this is never revealed, leaving the audience wondering if it’s part of a back story that was excised from the final script, or if it’s just a case of Screenwriting Expediency 101, a way to keep the crew ahead of the Germans without them having to work too hard to get there.  Ellison is the only character who gets a story arc, and while his initial shock is well presented, though predictable given his introduction, when he does take to killing Nazis, all of a sudden he’s enjoying it.  The change in attitude is too quick, and is an example of Ayer’s script downplaying motivation in favour of the next big action sequence.

The extended sequence in the apartment of Irma and Emma is another case in point where Ayer seems to be scratching the surface of an issue, highlighting the essential need, even in wartime, for people to hold on to their innate humanity.  Collier and Ellison treat both women with the utmost respect but when the rest of the crew bundles in creating tension around the table and being hostile and objectionable, the tone shifts uncomfortably and Travis in particular is allowed to behave as if social manners were alien to him (he later apologises to Ellison but it’s not in the least convincing – if it were to happen in real life it would appear forced and contrived).  The whole sequence becomes uneven and any message that Ayer was aiming for becomes lost in the telling.  He then adds a layer of tragedy that speaks of the callous nature of war but which, for the viewer, will only come across as an unnecessary twist in the tale.

With so many apparent flaws in the screenplay, and with its shifting tone proving hard to pin down, Fury presents a problem for the viewer in that it’s a movie that attempts to take a snapshot of one part of what happened in World War II and to make it resonate beyond that snapshot.  This is almost a timepiece, a movie where the overall picture is lost in the mist and shadow that permeates the fields and roads that the tanks travel through.  It’s not a bad approach as such, but without that wider focus, Fury limits itself to being solely about the men inside a tank, and with no real effort to expand on their characters, it becomes a snapshot with no context.

Screenplay issues notwithstanding, the movie is on firmer ground with its action scenes, making the tank skirmishes urgent and vital, and deftly playing up the cramped conditions under which the crew operate, making a virtue of the economy of movement needed to load and fire the shells (try and count how many times we see Swan’s foot press down on the firing pedal).  These scenes are impressively shot and edited together by Roman Vasyanov, and Jay Cassidy and Dody Dorn respectively, and offer a few heart-stopping moments along the way.  But Ayer then settles for a final showdown between Fury and the advancing German troops that lifts action beats from every direct-to-video war movie you’ve ever seen, and which sacrifices credibility for the kind of careless heroics that undermines (and overturns) everything that’s gone before.

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On the whole, Fury isn’t a bad movie per se, it’s sadly a movie that never quite realises its full potential.  It does feature some very good performances however, and these raise up the movie when it most needs it.  Pitt is as intense and commanding as ever, dominating every scene he’s in and making it difficult for the audience to concentrate on anyone else.  But matching him – thankfully – is Lerman, putting in a career best performance that quickly obliterates any embarrassing memories of him in the Percy Jackson movies or The Three Musketeers (2011).  As Ellison grows up on screen so too does Lerman, showing a range and a conviction that’s eluded him up until now.  It’s a pleasure to watch him match the likes of Pitt and his co-stars, all actors who, on their day, can impress beyond all expectations.  (Well, maybe not LaBeouf, but here he’s tolerable and seems required to stare fixedly at Pitt for most of the movie, but good luck with working out what emotion he’s meant to be feeling.)

Ayer is a talented individual, and he’s written some great scripts over the last fifteen years; he’s also making a name for himself as a director as well, but to date End of Watch (2012) remains his most fully realised project.  Fury will definitely attract audiences initially but there’s a sense that, ironically, it won’t have “legs”.  Which is a shame, as the movie could have been so much better had Ayer been more rigorous with his script.

Rating: 7/10 – slightly better than average but with enough problems to make viewing the movie more disappointing than not, Fury bristles with energy during its action scenes but otherwise is sluggish; one to see on the big screen though, and with one’s expectations firmly kept in check.

The Book Thief (2013)

19 Wednesday Mar 2014

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Book Thief, The

D: Brian Percival / 131m

Cast: Geoffrey Rush, Emily Watson, Sophie Nélisse, Ben Schnetzer, Nico Liersch, Levin Liam, Rainer Bock, Barbara Auer, Roger Allam

Literary adaptations are a perilous thing, both for filmmakers and audiences alike. For every Schindler’s List there’s a Bonfire of the Vanities. Some are critically bulletproof, such as the Harry Potter series; despite the turgid nature of the first two movies featuring the bespectacled wizard, they were huge box office successes and paved the way for the remaining instalments (which, effectively, meant they were commercially bulletproof as well). Most fall somewhere in-between, neither success nor failure but an often strange combination of the two e.g. The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones or Smilla’s Sense of Snow, one moment distilling the essence of the original novel, the next demolishing that moment with an ill-judged sequence or change from the source material. Others simply die on the screen (the aforementioned Bonfire of the Vanities, The Osterman Weekend, the Jack Black version of Gulliver’s Travels).

Most try to be faithful to the novel they’re adapting but sometimes this is the very thing that stops the movie from being a success: by cleaving to the set-up, the characters and the events depicted in the novel, the movie somehow misses the spark that made the book a must-read. Instead of a must-see movie, audiences are presented with an adaptation that keeps the essential components but fails to breathe cinematic life into them.

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And so it is with The Book Thief. Adapted from the novel by Markus Zusak, The Book Thief in question is Liesel Meminger (Nelisse), a young girl who is given up for adoption by her mother (who may or may not be a communist) during the Second World War. She is taken in by the Hubermanns, Hans (Rush) and Rosa (Watson). Hans is a gentle, encouraging man who teaches Liesel how to read; from this Liesel develops her love of books. Rosa is stern and constantly criticising Liesel’s behaviour (though you know she has a soft spot for her, however horrid she might be). As time goes by and Liesel settles in to life with her new Mama and Papa, the war that seems to be going on in a separate part of Germany altogether, begins to encroach on their daily lives.

One day a young Jewish man called Max Vandenburg (Schnetzer) comes to their house. On the run from the Nazis, he is hurt and needs a place to hide. Owing a debt to his father, the Hubermanns at first hide him in Liesel’s room, then transfer him to the basement. There is an anxious occasion when a Nazi officer visits them and asks to see the basement but he goes away pretty quickly and has no idea that Max is there (and it turns out he’s not even looking for him). Helped back to nearly full health by Rosa’s administrations and Liesel’s reading to him (through books stolen from the burgermeister’s library), Max leaves before he can put them in greater danger. Then Hans is conscripted, despite his age. With the war getting nearer and nearer, Liesel’s future looks increasingly uncertain.

The Book Thief is a curiously flat, dramatically sterile movie that sticks to the same pace from its strikingly photographed opening to its let’s-try-and-be-upbeat-even-though-the-ending’s-a-downer conclusion. There’s very little drama here, very little of what the Germans refer to as sturm und drang (“storm and drive”). Michael Petroni’s adaptation is as dull and uneventful as a trip to a colour chart museum. There’s the visit by the Nazi officer, which should have the viewer on the edge of their seat, but as there’s so little invested in Max’s character, it doesn’t come across as a tense moment at all; it would have been more dramatic by this point if he had been discovered. The only other source of “trouble” that Liesel faces is from school bully and Nazi Youth member Franz Deutscher (Liam), and all he does is make empty threats about “reporting” her (and literally does no more than that). With such an absence of tension throughout, The Book Thief – while remaining true to its source – ends up being a collection of scenes that relate to each other but do little to involve the viewer at any particular point.

As a result, Rush and Watson have to fall back on their expertise to raise their characters from the level of caricatures or cardboard cut-outs, while newcomer Nelisse actually manages to impress even though she has as little to work with as her more experienced co-stars. Percival’s direction does nothing to improve things and is workmanlike at best, though the production – on a technical level – makes up for the emotional detachment, and is often lovely to look at. And there should be one final word for the narrator. Step forward, Death, as voiced by Roger Allam. If there is any further proof required that The Book Thief doesn’t work as well as it should, then take a listen to the dreadful dialogue Allam has to give voice to. If you’re not cringing after the first few sentences (right at the start of the movie) then you’ll probably enjoy The Book Thief a lot more than most.

Rating: 5/10 – dull as the proverbial ditchwater, and spoilt by a lack of engagement from its director and its writer; saved by the professionalism of its cast and crew, but a major disappointment nevertheless.

The Monuments Men (2014)

21 Friday Feb 2014

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Monuments Men, The

D: George Clooney / 118m

Cast: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Hugh Bonneville, Bob Balaban, Dimitri Leonidas, Justus von Dohnányi, Holger Handtke

When you see the phrase “Based on a true story” at the beginning of a movie, there’s an expectation that what you’re about to see really happened, and in the way that it’s portrayed.  But the key word is “based”.  The word serves as a get-out clause for filmmakers the world over, so that when anyone criticises a movie for its accuracy they can say it’s not meant to be taken as a de facto retelling of events but as an interpretation.

With The Monuments Men, actor/director and co-scripter Clooney has taken a relatively unknown tale from World War II and – forgive the clumsy analogy – used broad brush strokes to bring it to the screen.  Playing Frank Stokes, we first see him in 1943 canvassing President Roosevelt about the importance of finding and safeguarding the huge amount of art that the Nazis are plundering across Europe, as well as asking for the military’s cooperation in avoiding unnecessary damage to important historical buildings and monuments.  Asked by Roosevelt how many men he needs, Stokes tells him six.

The six men are Americans James Granger (Damon), Richard Campbell (Miurray), Walter Garfield (Goodman), and Preston Savitz (Balaban), plus Brit Donald Jeffries (Bonneville), and Frenchman Jean Claude Clermont (Dujardin).  All six have the skills and the experience Stokes needs to identify, trace and recover the stolen art, and two pieces in particular: Michelangelo’s Madonna of Bruges and Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece.  Splitting up to cover as much ground as possible the men set about tracing various treasures and seeking the cooperation necessary to avoid the continued ruinous bombing of buildings such as Monte Cassino.  In this respect, and despite clear orders from Roosevelt, they find themselves rebuffed at every turn.  They have better luck tracing the routes the Nazis are using to hide everything, but they still always seem to be one step behind.

In Paris, Granger is put in touch with Claire Simone (Blanchett).  She has a detailed list of all the artwork and treasures that were stolen by the Nazis in Paris, as well as who they belonged to and where they were to be taken.  Using this list, Stokes and co are able to discover the locations the Nazis chose to hide everything.  With the war now drawing to a close they face a race against time to reach the treasures before the approaching Russians.

Monuments Men, The - scene

The story of the Monuments Men and their achievements makes for a thrilling read but on screen it’s a different matter.  Clooney and co-scripter (and long-time collaborator) Grant Heslov have fashioned a story from the facts that has all the hallmarks of a rush job.  Character development is perfunctory and relies on the actors to fill in the gaps by using established traits: Dujardin flashes the winning smile seen in The Artist, Murray rehashes his bucolic approach to Lost in Translation, and Goodman continues to play the same role he’s played for the last ten years.  In a way it’s a clever approach, a kind of cinematic shorthand to help introduce the characters quickly and then get on with things, but other than the fact that these men all knew (or knew of) each other before coming together, we don’t really get to know them.  As Stokes, Clooney takes a back seat, giving himself a couple of rousing, authoritative speeches, and generally directing traffic – that’s not a criticism, there is an awful lot of poring over maps and working out which direction to take.  Damon and Blanchett struggle to make her initial distrust of Granger credible, while Bonneville’s turn as the plucky Brit using the mission to overcome his drink problem, though one of the (slightly) better performances, is undermined when you realise his drink problem isn’t going to reoccur and jeopardise things.

The movie also jumps about quite a bit as it attempts to cover both time and distance.  The events shown take place between 1943 and the end of the war.  Some scenes, particularly Garfield and Clermont’s encounter with a sniper, seem included for no other reason than they might prove exciting, but this rarely works out.  Clooney tries to instil a sense of urgency, but the timescale defeats him every time.  Even towards the end with the Russians right around the corner and the Madonna of Bruges to be rescued, there’s just no excitement to be had.  And when the team are put in harm’s way, it’s hard to be concerned because a) you don’t care enough them (see previous paragraph) and Clooney’s direction doesn’t stretch itself enough to provide any tension.

What you have then is a strangely flat movie that never really takes off but which, thanks to both the art and Phedon Papamichael’s wonderful photography, looks good and is handsomely mounted.  Clooney does have a good eye for composition, and he uses the camera to good effect throughout but by the end it’s not enough to distract from the disappointment that will have already been felt.  There’s also some misguided humour, along with a few too many one-liners (there are times when the movie skirts perilously close to coming across as a kind of Ocean’s Seven).  One moment, though, that does deserve a mention: Campbell, having received a recording from his daughter, hears it played over the camp tannoy system while in the shower.  As his tears mingle with the water from the shower, it’s an instance of emotional beauty in amongst all that glorious art.

Rating: 6/10 – a missed opportunity, too lacking in focus and without a cohesive script; a great story that will hopefully be revisited at a later date.