THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN: THE SECRET OF THE UNICORN

(Steven Spielberg, 2011)

For all that Spielberg and Peter Jackson's spectacular and expensive adaptation of Herge's popular creation has it's many pleasures, it never quite feels right. It never quite feels like Tintin. It feels as if they sought to make a Tintin film, were denied the rights by Herge's estate, and instead made a blatant knock-off in which everything is extremely similar, but nothing is really how it should be. Given that they weren't denied the rights and that most of the details of Tintin's distinctive fictional world are here recreated with painstaking detail and love, that's something of a major worry.
Part of the problem is the animation. Using the near photo-realistic motion capture and cgi technology beloved of Robert Zemeckis allows for massive invention and precision in so many of the visual particulars that it's easy to see why it appeals to filmmakers. But it also means that the "uncanny valley" is a problem throughout, one only complicated by the decision to render many of the characters - Captain Haddock, most obviously - in a sort of realist-caricature style. It also has its drawbacks in the areas which seem initially like Pluses. Athmosphere seems like something that can be painted into the corners of a scene, augmented by accenting the detail of the objects in a room, sharpening the colours of a palette, softening the lighting, allowing shadows to run longer. But it's more complex than that. The scenes of exotic North Africa and the middle East in the Indiana Jones movies are effortlessly, pungently atmospheric in a way simiiar scenes in this film are not. The Indiana Jones films were made on location, in ancient towns and baking deserts. Here, most everything feels hermetically sealed, without any grit or soul. The same problem afflicts the many, often brilliantly conceived, thrillingly "shot" action sequences. The level of detail and inventiveness is truly incredible, but that somehow only emphasises our distance from such patently made material, and is indeed even a distraction.
The screenplay, by the dazzling trio of Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish and Steven Moffat, is solid, working a traditional Tintin mystery and a Spielbergan set-piece roller coaster into the same film and making it work, and seamlessly for the most part, though there are a few clunky lines scattered throughout. The cast is impressive, everybody nailing the spirit and personality of hs character. And there are some nice visual gags and slapstick here, together with many beautiful images. But the whole thing, which is breathlessly paced most of the way, ends in a horrendous anti-climax, followed by the inevitable threat of a sequel. And while it may work to some degree with its target audience of 10 year old boys, as Spielberg adventure films go, this is strictly second rank.

GAMBIT

(Ronald Neame, 1966)

Odd how certain films are accorded Classic status, while others, sometimes more deserving, slip through the cracks to some extent.
Gambit is a clever, funny and suspenseful caper film from the mid-sixties. It's romantic, always nice to look at, and a rewarding narrative experience. Yet it's far from acclaimed as a classic. Perhaps it's a little too self-consciously clever in its Twisty-turniness. Perhaps the combination of Michael Caine and Shirley Maclaine in the lead roles doesn't have the requisite old school star power of something like Charade, say.
It should be a classic, I think. Detailing the carefully planned heist of an ancient sculpture from a reclusive North African Billionaire (drolly played by Herbert Lom), Gambit is always imaginative and interesting in it's approach.
It is also a catalogue of the pleasures of studio filmmaking at just the moment when they were about to evaporate under commercial and artistic pressure, in the mid to late 1960s. But this film is shot in lovely, thick technicolour on beautifully designed sets filled with actors in glamourous costumes. The instances of location shooting - the opening long shot of the streets of Hong Kong through the windscreen of a moving car is superbly vivid and evocative - enrich the sense of place and atmosphere.
The story is slight and familiar, but the storytelling is superb. The opening act depicts the heist going like clockwork, all the elements falling perfectly into place. MacLaine doesn't speak a word in this entire sequence, a mute doll until 27 minutes in when the story evaporates and we see that we have been shown Caine's plan as he would like it to happen, before he has actually met MacLaine. The rest of the film depicts the actual truth of the plan, ruined and adjusted throughout by complicated, awkward reality.
If the difference between how we imagine - or wish - life were and how it actually is is the real subject of Gambit, well the presentation is just as important. It slips in a little romance, a little suspense, some nicely comic moments, and always remains light and colourful.
And it is headlined by a couple of proper movie stars, MacLaine doing a variation on her kooky, vulnerable dame with a tough streak, while Caine lets his slightly reptilian looks and natural charm both work for his character, who flips from charming to selfish thoughout. They have enough chemistry to make their relationship charm, just like the film itself.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

(Lynne Ramsay, 2011)

Bathed in the red of blood from its very first scenes, which segue into a really extraordinary first act of non-linear emotional and tonal free association, told loosely from the point of view of Tilda Swinton's character. She is struggling with grief and regret and trying desperately to drag herself through a "normal" life while continuously assailed by memories of her past life; a transcendent moment at a surreal tomato festival in Spain, the glow of passion from the early days with her husband, the bright bubbliness of her daughter. And Kevin.
Kevin is a near-Satanic presence in that first act, a screaming infant, a scowling toddler, a brattish boy and finally a knowing, sarcastic teen. The relationship between mother and son is central to the film, and both Swinton and Ezra Miller rise to it in their scenes together, a delicate duel between two combatants locked in a love/hate dynamic.
That is over-simplistic, which Ramsay's film never is. Rather it is ambiguous in the right places and elliptical throughout, refusing exposition and doling out backstory piecemeal so that when the extent of Kevin's act is revealed - though we already know what he has done - still it carries a huge emotional shock. The fractured sequence when Swinton arrives at Kevin's high-school and we see hysteria and bodies on gurneys, lit by the red light of emergency vehicles, is purgatorial, for we know that for all her anxiety worrying about her son and his safety, her situation is about to get much worse. Her numb shock in the aftermath - a state that pulses through the film in scenes of her echoed responses to the world and it's distant banality. She finds a job, a house, shops, feeds herself, tries to avoid the parents of Kevin's victims, all of it without feeling, Swinton's face frozen with shock.
The dominant emotion for a long stretch is dread. Much of this film feels like Horror, partly because we know what Kevin will do.
Ramsay never tries to explain his actions; his final "explanation" in the surprisingly cathartic last scene, feels authentically random and true. He doesn't know. Though obviously a psychopath, the "adult" Kevin is complex and resists easy labelling, self-aware enough to have a nice, quotable rationale ready for media consumption. Miller is charismatic and beautiful but there is a darkness to his presence which works beautifully with the character. Swinton is even better, making a difficult character sympathetic and explicable throughout, her pain and confusion always evident.
But this is a directors film, and Ramsay, one of the most distinctive talents in modern cinema, is always in control, displaying her great eye and compositional sense (ably abetted by cinematographer Seamus McGarvey), drawing good work from her cast, precisely controlling the tempo and pacing of her narrative and editing, and, as she's done in each of her films, working a terrific soundtrack against her story and imagery. There are a couple of slight missteps - Swinton scrubbing the red paint from her house is a little too obvious a metaphor for my liking - but for the most part, We Need To Talk About Kevin is a gruelling, acute, hugely impressive piece of work from a truly exciting filmmaker.

THREE KINGS

(David O.Russell, 1999)

David O. Russell's Three Kings is an unashamedly political film. Russell benefitted from several years of hindsight in his treatment of the first Gulf War. He could more or less say what he liked about it, so his film is highly critical of that Bush Government's treatment of Iraqi rebels who rose up against Saddam when it became apparent that he was losing the War. But Russell was savvy in his criticism - he veiled it in a terrific action comedy which felt, at the time, unlike just about anything else anyone was doing. Indeed, watching the film now it looks like a masterpiece of sorts. It has aged extremely well.
In recent years, American cinema has profited handsomely from the collision of Indie creativity with Studio money. Russell is a great example of this faustian phenomenon. His debut, Spanking the Monkey is a sweatily well-observed, pitch black incest comedy, made for not a lot of money. He followed it with the broader Flirting With Disaster for Miramax, but despite the presence of bigger not-quite stars (Ben Stiller, Tea Leoni) his work managed to retain some of its independent edge. Its there in the off-centre characterisation, the portrayal of America as a zoo for neurotics of various shades. Three Kings is something else entirely. A mega-budget semi-Blockbuster with some rising stars and the backing of one of the big studios in Warner Bros, it asked a lot of a young Indie director. But it was worthwhile. His film manages to feel like a big action movie with an indie sensibility, a fairly unique beast.
Early on, everything is comic. That first shot of featureless desert horizon punctured by the incongruously surreal vision of a young Iraqi waving a white cloth from atop a small bunker/hill, the helmet of a US soldier in the bottom corner of the frame; sets the tone as just slighty askew. This is not how big studio War movies start. That this movie will be different is only underlined by its first dialogue, beginning an instant later, and shouted across the desert floor, a dunderheaded, repetitious exchange between grunts, part Beckett, part Abbott & Costello.
Russell treats the grunts with a cynical detachment - he likes his heroes, you feel, but he is aware that they are all flawed individuals. His montage of their victory celebration paints them as jingoistic, meathead fratboys, a depiction much of the remainder of the film works hard to balance. Even so, there is something of the Coens in his sensibility, the notion that he feels somewhat superior to his characters and periodically cannot resist patronising them, even sneering at their idiocies. The conversation about "perfectly good substitutes" for racial terms of abuse for Iraqis is a good example. Russell was clever enough to cast likeable actors, however, and his film is structured cunningly so that the action and drama kicks in suddenly, and the audience is dragged along with the narrative's momentum, the heroes abruptly established as such.
The comedy, while it lasts, is a mixture of effects. Russell uses whatever may produce a laugh: slapstick, satire, sight gags and funny dialogue all feature. This is a film which depicts an exploding cow, while also featuring a character mistake bullion for "them little cubes you put in hot water to make soup" and employing a sudden, and frankly, quite brilliant cut to Chicago's "If You Leave Me now" in the tense preamble to an action sequence. Russell makes it all work, and it makes the film feel richer, more electric.
If Three Kings has a direct ancestor, it is Kelly's Heroes, Brian G. Hutton's 1970 Clint Eastwood vehicle about a heist by a platoon of GIs in Nazi-controlled Italy. That too was an action-comedy, though it entirely lacked any political dimension and it's action was far tamer than Russell's. He had never directed action before, and as a result those sequences are often sloppy and obviously the work of a director new to this type of material. And yet this inexperience is a boon - the action scenes are entirely lacking in the baggage of a seasoned pro, they seem almost to come without influences. As a result they feel fresh, with more impact and resonance than most action scenes. Russell signals his intentions with the early scene in which Clooney explains how a bullet can cause sepsis and the camera zips into and out of a body like an invisible scalpel, capturing the spurt of bile from a ruptured organ from the inside. Russell takes this violence seriously, it seems, he feels every bullet, and he seems determined to ensure that audiences do too. This pays off later when we see the anatomy of the escalation of the initial gunfight, the camera woozily cutting and panning across the spaces between combatants as a domino effect of thunderous shots and visceral impacts pulses through a town square, leaving men dead. Later on, characters we care about will be shot, even die, and Russell wants us to feel that too, to see the lunacy of it all.
Stylistically, the film is mainly handheld, giving it a jittery immediacy. The colours are washed out, bleached by the desert sun, most obviously in the earlier scenes. This over-exposed look has been much imitated since. Russell also indulges in some strange, almost disturbing frame compositions, and makes a few references to other movies - that first action scene is notable for its self-consciously posed close-ups of Clooney and Ice Cube, filtered light discolouring them, clouds streaming by unnaturally fast overhead. These shots seem like ultra-pop homages to Sergio Leone (which makes sense, given the duel that has just occurred) , and stand out because they are so different to the way the rest of the film is shot. Is Russell underlining that this is the moment priorities changed for these men, or ironically mocking their own possible self-images as bad-ass American fighting men? The way Russell portrays Clooney's character as a cool customer throughout, the latter suggestion seems unlikely. He gives the men credit for following their consciences, the poor treatment afforded to Iraqi villagers snapping them out of their greed and forcing them to intervene. Here he sets the standard so many later Iraq films cling to - he lauds the men on the ground while attacking the politicians. But this is not a simple issue and Russell does not avoid its complexity, either. He makes it clear that these men are conflicted about helping the rebels in the longer term, beyond the initial situation in the town square. Indeed, they are more or less blackmailed into lending aid after their own lives have been saved. Wahlberg's character emerges from a torture-and-lecture session with more empathy for everybody - he is in severe shock - and falls in line with the others, who have all seen the light during their journey. At the end, the Rebels and their safe passage seems more important to the men than the gold. Of course Russell undercuts this with the final hint that even then, some of the gold was looted.
Much of the political context is made explicit in the dialogue. The film has an entire subplot about one Reporter searching for a story amidst a sea of reporters earching for stories, and indeed begins and ends with TV news report footage. As if that was too subtle, a character says "This is a media War" at one point. Clooney refers to "Bush" with a near-visible sneer, and uses him as a figurehead, with great irony, in his speech to rouse rebellion : "God bless America and God bless a free Iraq!" The speech fails, a possible allusion to the co-opting of American patriotism together with Iraqi nationalism. Clooney's superior, played by a brusque Mykelti Williamson, asks him a prescient question when he wonders what the purpose of the War was, if not to dethrone Saddam: "What do you wanna do, occupy Iraq and do Vietnam all over again?" But the most chilling scenes of political comment are the torture sequences wherein Said Taghmaoui's Captain tortures Wahlberg's frightened grunt for no particular reason. He just seems to want to teach him a lesson. And he does, pouring oil down his throat to ensure he understands the real motivation for the War. Wahlberg's dazed replies to his enquiries: "to maintain the stability of the region" etc, his lack of understanding of why he is there; are perhaps Russell's most pointed comment on his countries role in that conflict.
One of Three Kings other great strengths is obvious in that scene - this is unequivocally a film about the modern world, about how we live now, how things are and will be. American cultural imperialism is a given, so alongside torturing Wahlberg, Taghmaoui wants to discuss Michael Jackson with him, all the while awkwardly - and hilariously - using American slang terms to address him : Bro, Mymainman. His men watch MTV on stolen Kuwaiti televisions and risk their lives for Levis. Everybody has an intimate knowledge of Lexus models and Easy Listening tapes hide in Arab cars. Then there is the casual and brilliant realism of many of the references in Russell's dialogue - his soldiers discuss American Football, cars, religion, are at first awed by the violence they encounter. Ice Cube is a devout Christian, Spike Jonze an ignorant hick ("from a group home"). When Wahlberg rings his wife she asks him if she should apply for a job for him. The leader of the Iraqi rebels was educated in the US. Clooney ends up as a consultant on Hollywood action movies. This density of detail gives the movie texture, allows its narrative to breathe because the characters feel real and lived-in. Again, this makes their eventual loss and peril more affecting, meaning that the climax has a real power to it. Even better, Russell ends with a euphoric little coda, and perhaps the best ever, only-slightly ironic use of U2 in film.

CONTAGION

(Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

Taking a particular subgenre of the popular 1970s disaster movie, the pandemic thriller, and thoroughly modernising it, Soderbergh, together with his screenwriter Scott Z Burns, demonstrates again that there are few better filmmakers in America currently making adult entertainments. Contagion is a procedural, a precise account of how a virus spreads through the world, and also an account of how the bodies put in place by the human race identify it, classify it and eventually counter it. But it is also, in it's inimitably Soderberghian, chilly way, an utterly gripping thriller. We see people we like put at risk and tested by this virus, we wonder who it will take next, and the deaths of two major stars tell us early on that nobody is safe. Then we are with the scientists racing to create a vaccine in order to save not one, but millions of lives.
Then there is the fact that it is an epic. Almost casually epic, a globetrotting, international story with a massive cast of speaking parts and at least five separate and equally important narrative threads running simultaneously. And nobody - except perhaps Micahel Mann - captures the real world, "the now" quite as well as Soderbergh does. Each location feels different and distinctive, from Hong Kong to the American Midwest, largely due to Soderbergh's ability to pick up on detail and texture in his environments.
Detail is crucial here; early on the camera lingers an almost subliminal beat longer on certain objects and surfaces until the viewer queasily realises that these are all subject to communal touch; a bowl of peanuts on a bar, a door handle, a handrail on public transport. Later the visceral fear of germs, and by extension of other people, is vividly communicated in the arc following Damon's character, immune to the virus himself but terrified his teenaged daughter might get it.
He is as solid as ever, but each of the stars here dials down the wattage on their starpower in order to slip seamlessly into the impressive ensemble. Jennifer Ehle is perhaps the great standout, but she too is outshone by the film's focal character and protagonist; the virus itself.

CRAZY STUPID LOVE

(Glen Ficara & John Requa, 2011)

Playing By Heart is a 1998 comedy drama, directed by one Willard Carroll, with a surprisingly starry cast. Sean Connery, Angelina Jolie, Ryan Phillippe,, Jon Stewart, Dennis Quaid, Madeilne Stowe and Gena Rowlands are all part of the impressive ensemble. It's blandly shot, set to an eclectic soundtrack of pop songs, and set in the most middle class, glossily attractive parts of Los Angeles. It's a portrayal of a disparate group of characters in the city and their relationships and struggles with love. Its like a less ambitious, less accomplished, less interesting spin on superior multi-character LA dramas like Robert Altman's Short Cuts, Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia or Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon. Those films all grapple with multiple themes and deeper trends, with knotty social and emotional problems, and ultimately with life itself. Not Playing By Heart. It's about love, nothing more, nothing less. And that's ok. Love is a worthy and profound subject, and has inspired thousands of great works of art, from pop songs to poetry to novels to cinema. I'm just not sure that the romantic comedy is the genre best suited to discussing it. Well, perhaps the auteur-driven romantic comedy. Creative intelligences like that Woody Allen or Albert Brooks have done it with conspicuous success in the past. But the slick romcom, all effortlessly nice fashion, unconvincingly spacious homes, identity-less, boring music and predictably conventional storytelling? That sort of risk free, lazy film is all about love. But the form seems to prevent any sort of deeper consideration of the subject as a theme. The superficial and narrative elements never go far enough. Love is strange, but worthwhile, is the greeting card conclusion many such films seem to settle upon.
Crazy Stupid Love even includes the word in its title, and its characters openly discuss love as an intangible and an ideal on a couple of occasions. It centres around an interlinked - of course - collection of people in LA. Steve Carell plays a fortysomething whose wife, played with customary class and rawness by Julianne Moore, asks him for a divorce on a date one night. Sent reeling back clueless onto the singles scene he meets a dapper young stud, played by the effortlessly smug Ryan Gosling, who instructs him how to dress, talk and pick up women, before he himself falls in love. Meanwhile Carell's 13 year-old son is in love with his 17 year-old babysitter, who loves Carell and the links and contrivances go on.
There are moments of truth and some laughs in a script which sporadically pops with wisdom on the reality of marriage, for instance, or the cruelty of singledom. The attractive cast makes much of it work much better than it should; Carell's sincerity is nicely-deployed, and contrasts well with Gosling's preening self-regard.
Ultimately, however, it all climaxes in a series of farcical confrontations and public declarations; the kind of thing, in short, that happens exclusively in romcoms. It may provide narrative satisfaction, but it shortchanges the films seeming ambition to examine love as a theme. All that's left, then, are the superficial pleasures; the music, the clothes, the locations, and a couple of decent belly-laughs.

TAKE SHELTER

(Jeff Nichols, 2011)

It's a nice idea; take a modern recession-era family drama and splice in some of the horror of an Old Testament tale. Sit back and wait as modern concepts of sanity and reason are torn apart. Writer-director Nichols here confirms what his first film, Shotgun Stories, suggested; that he is one of the brightest young filmmakers working in America today. He takes this material and filters it through a unique sensibility; his eye for the huge skies gaping above Texas is matched by skill in composing frames set in the bland spaces of modern suburban and smalltown America. And his principal actors are magnificent. Michael Shannon easily evokes the sheer dread his character begins to feel when his dreams take a turn for the apocalyptic. Nichols here reveals an unexpected facility with horror imagery; these dreams are tense and eerie, even terrifying, and they haunt the first half of the film, particularly when the character begins to hallucinate too. Shannon's queasy expressions play with tremendous power when set against his usual menace. This is a man fighting for his mental health, yet gripped with faith that his visions might just be true.
Nichols complicates his situation by sketching in the delicate financial tightrope his family walks and making clear how crucial to that his regular pay check and healthcare cover is. Jessica Chastain is called upon mostly to react to Shannon's madness and suffering, but she creates a layered character out of what could be a cypher; she is frightened but tough, loyal and protective, and she has a couple of scenes of stunning power. Her facial expression in the final scene is brilliantly loaded, believable and ambiguous.
They are given solid support by the underappreiated Shea Wigham in another barely-literate hick role, which somehow only adds to the authentic, textured quality of Take Shelter, a tremendously assured, gripping and beautiful film.