(Paul McGuigan, 2009)
Notable elements of Push:
- A likeable performance from Chris Evans as telekinetic Nick Gant, wasting his powers as a hustler in Hong Kong after the opening flashback reveals his tragic back-story (similarly telekinetic father killed by Government goons the Division). Evans is effortlessly sympathetic and amusing when he needs to be, and he makes a frustrating character that much more tolerable.
- Hong Kong itself, all buzzing energy in the streets and markets, nimbly captured by McGuigan's camera.
- The world of this film is like a mini Marvel or DC universe, but here it tries to establish that universe and its rules within the boundaries of a single two hour film, making it overstuffed and hard to follow.
- There are some imaginative treatments of super-powers and their potential uses; Cliff Curtis uses his power of suggestion to live a continual party lifestyle, for instance, rather than trying to save or conquer the world.
- The final set-piece is set in the skeleton of a half-completed skyscraper (cliche), involves two telekinetics throwing power-assisted punches at one another while Chinese gangsters die in their dozens around them, and still manages to be tremendously dull.
- An under-developed, unconvincing, half-arsed romance between Evans and Belle, which takes attention away from the far more interesting friendship between Evans and Dakota Fanning's clairvoyant.
- McGuigan directs with a good feel for place and tone and an efficient handle on action scenes.
-Djimon Hounsou has entirely the wrong sort of presence for the role of Big Bad in a film like this, and that severely weakens the balance here.
Showing posts with label 2000s Cinema. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2000s Cinema. Show all posts
Friday, 18 December 2015
Friday, 21 August 2015
SEABISCUIT
(Gary Ross, 2003)
The choice of David McCullough - his voice probably best known from a variety of Ken Burns' documentaries - as narrator is instructive about Gary Ross' aims for this film, and also about its flaws. The first act - and brief passages later on - is dominated by McCullough's narration over black and white photographs of the period. This was real, Ross seems to be telling us, this is important. This is no silly made-up story. This matters.
The story of the rise of the champion US racehorse Seabiscuit explicitly treats him as a metaphor for America itself during the great depression, seemingly taking a tip from the horse's owner (played here by Jeff Bridges) who publicised him as the horse of the people, an underdog who represented the way every American has a second chance.
That first act is problematic - Seabiscuit takes a long time getting to its actual story, so busy is it with context and background. After that, Ross hits a series of classical, reliable old beats. This film is handsome - too handsome in a rich, oaken way for a film set partly during the depression - has a classy score, courtesy of Randy Newman, a great cast, all of whom are good; and doesn't miss out on any sports movie cliches at all. So there are slow-motion climaxes, disappointments at crucial junctures, last minute comebacks, personal demons resolved through sporting effort, etc etc.
It works in the way that such films always work. Those cliches are so popular entirely because of their efficiency. But that is somewhat at odds with the straining for seriousness of the documentary passages.
And the closing narration, courtesy of Maguire, about fixing each other, is an embarrassment.
The choice of David McCullough - his voice probably best known from a variety of Ken Burns' documentaries - as narrator is instructive about Gary Ross' aims for this film, and also about its flaws. The first act - and brief passages later on - is dominated by McCullough's narration over black and white photographs of the period. This was real, Ross seems to be telling us, this is important. This is no silly made-up story. This matters.
The story of the rise of the champion US racehorse Seabiscuit explicitly treats him as a metaphor for America itself during the great depression, seemingly taking a tip from the horse's owner (played here by Jeff Bridges) who publicised him as the horse of the people, an underdog who represented the way every American has a second chance.
That first act is problematic - Seabiscuit takes a long time getting to its actual story, so busy is it with context and background. After that, Ross hits a series of classical, reliable old beats. This film is handsome - too handsome in a rich, oaken way for a film set partly during the depression - has a classy score, courtesy of Randy Newman, a great cast, all of whom are good; and doesn't miss out on any sports movie cliches at all. So there are slow-motion climaxes, disappointments at crucial junctures, last minute comebacks, personal demons resolved through sporting effort, etc etc.
It works in the way that such films always work. Those cliches are so popular entirely because of their efficiency. But that is somewhat at odds with the straining for seriousness of the documentary passages.
And the closing narration, courtesy of Maguire, about fixing each other, is an embarrassment.
Monday, 3 August 2015
WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER
(David Wain, 2001)
Something just a little off about Wain's parody, which is perhaps what has given it enduring appeal and made it a cult film, while so many movie spoofs date quickly and are never thought about again.
The sense of humour here is more Anchorman than Scary Movie - there is a decided strain of absurdism and an anarchic sensibility informing many of the jokes, which makes it feel like anything can happen (the trip into town that ends up in a crackhouse montage is the best example of this) -and the writing is generally very strong, and clever, making sure there is a variety of comic material throughout.
Firstly, it works as a spoof. Set on the last day of summer camp in 1981 and focused on a disparate group of characters mainly concerned with pairing off before they all go their separate ways, the plot could come verbatim from some lost American teen movie from that era. The music is hilarious, the hair and fashions just right, and the photography and montage sequences are note perfect. The obsession with sex of more or less every character also tunes into tasteless '80s teen cinema in a way no modern teen comedy can ever really approach.
Then there are the flashes of surrealism, absurdism and post-modernism, with talking vegetable tins, psychic powers and falling satellites all part of the story.
Lastly, the characters are frequently hilarious, most notably Paul Rudd as a rebellious camp counsellor given to gurning and posing, Amy Poehler as a pretentious drama teacher, and Ken Marino as a desperately virginal colleague who embarks on an odyssey to lose his cherry.
The cast seems incredible in retrospect, which perhaps says enough about how good most of them are here.
Something just a little off about Wain's parody, which is perhaps what has given it enduring appeal and made it a cult film, while so many movie spoofs date quickly and are never thought about again.
The sense of humour here is more Anchorman than Scary Movie - there is a decided strain of absurdism and an anarchic sensibility informing many of the jokes, which makes it feel like anything can happen (the trip into town that ends up in a crackhouse montage is the best example of this) -and the writing is generally very strong, and clever, making sure there is a variety of comic material throughout.
Firstly, it works as a spoof. Set on the last day of summer camp in 1981 and focused on a disparate group of characters mainly concerned with pairing off before they all go their separate ways, the plot could come verbatim from some lost American teen movie from that era. The music is hilarious, the hair and fashions just right, and the photography and montage sequences are note perfect. The obsession with sex of more or less every character also tunes into tasteless '80s teen cinema in a way no modern teen comedy can ever really approach.
Then there are the flashes of surrealism, absurdism and post-modernism, with talking vegetable tins, psychic powers and falling satellites all part of the story.
Lastly, the characters are frequently hilarious, most notably Paul Rudd as a rebellious camp counsellor given to gurning and posing, Amy Poehler as a pretentious drama teacher, and Ken Marino as a desperately virginal colleague who embarks on an odyssey to lose his cherry.
The cast seems incredible in retrospect, which perhaps says enough about how good most of them are here.
Saturday, 25 July 2015
TRANSPORTER 3
(Olivier Megaton, 2008)
Megaton has probably the coolest name for any action director ever. It seems as if he was fated to be an action director. What a shame then that his direction of action scenes is so utterly inept. Cut to pieces, pointless zooms and pans tied to those cuts (for impact!), witless camera angles which detract from the performers physicality rather than enhancing it...he does more or less everything wrong.
His film then is a waste of Jason Statham, a martial artist whose combination of brute force and grace is unique in modern action cinema (he is half football hooligan, half black belt).
Staham plays "transporter" Frank for the third time, breaking all of his self-imposed rules yet again as he transports a Ukrainian girl across Europe for some gangsters.
Along the way there are the usual car chases, a fistfight in a garage, Statham (or in this case a stuntman with Megaton making little obvious effort to disguise that fact) on a bicycle, and lots of tough guy posturing. It is totally forgettable, laking even a single memorable set-piece.
Next to Megaton, other Luc Besson proteges like Louise Letterier and Pierre Morel look like Walter Hill.
Megaton has probably the coolest name for any action director ever. It seems as if he was fated to be an action director. What a shame then that his direction of action scenes is so utterly inept. Cut to pieces, pointless zooms and pans tied to those cuts (for impact!), witless camera angles which detract from the performers physicality rather than enhancing it...he does more or less everything wrong.
His film then is a waste of Jason Statham, a martial artist whose combination of brute force and grace is unique in modern action cinema (he is half football hooligan, half black belt).
Staham plays "transporter" Frank for the third time, breaking all of his self-imposed rules yet again as he transports a Ukrainian girl across Europe for some gangsters.
Along the way there are the usual car chases, a fistfight in a garage, Statham (or in this case a stuntman with Megaton making little obvious effort to disguise that fact) on a bicycle, and lots of tough guy posturing. It is totally forgettable, laking even a single memorable set-piece.
Next to Megaton, other Luc Besson proteges like Louise Letterier and Pierre Morel look like Walter Hill.
Sunday, 19 July 2015
MEAN GIRLS
(Mark Waters, 2004)
Mean Girls does something extremely difficult with seeming ease. It manages to be witty, subversive and self-aware without ever compromising on how well it works as a teen comedy. This is largely down to a terrific script by Tina Fey, but Waters' fleet direction and a brilliant cast do more than their share too.
Inspired by a non-fiction book on female social groups in High School and the damaging effects they can have, Fey's story follows the arrival of Cady Harron (Lindsay Lohan) to a pretty identikit movie High School in Illinois. She is quickly taken under the wing of a pair of outcasts, extravagantly camp Damian and sharp-tongued goth Janice (Lizzy Caplan) who sardonically run through the cliques dominating the school, centred around "the Plastics", a trio of glamorous, popular, bitchy girls led by Regina George (Rachel McAdams). After Regina befriends Cady, she hurts her by stealing a boy she likes. Cady's mission then is to infiltrate the Plastics and destroy them from the inside. But, in classic undercover cop movie fashion, while acting the part of a Plastic, Cady starts to actually become one, and it's hard to know where she ends and the Plastic begins.
The plotting is deft in the main storyline, and the characters register powerfully - McAdams make Regina a terrifyingly real little power-monger, while Lohan nicely plays Cady's corruption by the superficiality of the girls lives. But most of the gags - just as in Fey's great TV show, 30 Rock - are in the margins. Sight gags, throwaway lines, little character details: they mount up to give Mean Girls a density most high school comedies cannot approach.
This combination of genuine hilariousness and the truthful skewering of teen archetypes have made Mean Girls a modern classic. It's a shame that Waters has never done anything anywhere near as good, but also a tribute to the quality of Fey's script (she's also brilliant as Cady's geeky, concerned Maths teacher).
Mean Girls does something extremely difficult with seeming ease. It manages to be witty, subversive and self-aware without ever compromising on how well it works as a teen comedy. This is largely down to a terrific script by Tina Fey, but Waters' fleet direction and a brilliant cast do more than their share too.
Inspired by a non-fiction book on female social groups in High School and the damaging effects they can have, Fey's story follows the arrival of Cady Harron (Lindsay Lohan) to a pretty identikit movie High School in Illinois. She is quickly taken under the wing of a pair of outcasts, extravagantly camp Damian and sharp-tongued goth Janice (Lizzy Caplan) who sardonically run through the cliques dominating the school, centred around "the Plastics", a trio of glamorous, popular, bitchy girls led by Regina George (Rachel McAdams). After Regina befriends Cady, she hurts her by stealing a boy she likes. Cady's mission then is to infiltrate the Plastics and destroy them from the inside. But, in classic undercover cop movie fashion, while acting the part of a Plastic, Cady starts to actually become one, and it's hard to know where she ends and the Plastic begins.
The plotting is deft in the main storyline, and the characters register powerfully - McAdams make Regina a terrifyingly real little power-monger, while Lohan nicely plays Cady's corruption by the superficiality of the girls lives. But most of the gags - just as in Fey's great TV show, 30 Rock - are in the margins. Sight gags, throwaway lines, little character details: they mount up to give Mean Girls a density most high school comedies cannot approach.
This combination of genuine hilariousness and the truthful skewering of teen archetypes have made Mean Girls a modern classic. It's a shame that Waters has never done anything anywhere near as good, but also a tribute to the quality of Fey's script (she's also brilliant as Cady's geeky, concerned Maths teacher).
Sunday, 24 May 2015
WE OWN THE NIGHT
(James Gray, 2007)
James Gray's third film as writer-director, We Own the Night, feels generally a little too familiar. It covers territory audiences know well from a clutch of other films - New York Cops hunting down a drug ring, a man caught between friends and family, loyalty, violence, the dark streets of the American city in the past three decades, guilt, justice, revenge. You've seen it all before. You've seen it a few time sin the last decade, in fact. You've seen American Gangster or The Departed. We Own the Night is like a younger brother to those two films - its stars are less starry, its director less of a name, its budget and running time obviously less inflated.
Gray is a true auteur - he has written and directed each of his films, and they share his thematic concerns. He is interested in family, in violence, in guilt and responsibility. He is a gifted director. Each of the films is directed with a confidence and inventiveness that is remarkably assured. The problem seems to lie with his writing, which can be uneven. He writes some beautiful scenes - sparkling dialogue and powerful emotions brought to the surface, realistically and painfully - but also some real clunkers. The plotting - particularly in We Own the Night- can seem horribly second-hand and derivative. When in doubt, resort to violence, seems to be Gray's way. But his characters can ground the films with their painful dilemmas, each of them conflicted and agonised by their lives.
What is most distinctive is Gray's seriousness. Each of his films is sombre and darkly atmospheric, intent on its own little tragedy. The Yards seems bent on turning itself into a mini-Godfather with its seeming mission to look like a John Alton-shot film noir in colour and its operatic heights of tension and release. Indeed, each of his films is beautifully lensed, and Gray deserves praise for his classicism, his determination to shoot films uncorrupted by modern editing styles and lighting techniques. It gives his work a timeless look, warm and lived-in yet never shrinking from the grubbiness of the urban underbelly they observe. His skill as a director is most apparent in the impact each of his set-pieces delivers. We Own the Night, for instance, delivers a couple of stunning scenes. The first, a deafening, bloody police raid on a drug factory in a tenement building, is preceded by an equally impressive build-up of tension as one character feels that exposure as a police mole is close. The second is a car chase along a highway in a rainstorm. Here Gray's cutting and shot choice is exemplary yet never predictable, keeping the scene exciting yet intimate, horrific and convincingly confusing as it is. The film's finale - a bracingly suspenseful and visceral pursuit on foot through a field of reeds - is another example of his gift for set-pieces, as is the central fist-fight in The Yards, perhaps the most realistic ever put on film. He is adept at evoking clammy fear, the dread of discovery, the adrenaline of sudden violence, always a you-are-there feeling of inhabiting a scene, perhaps because his approach to such scenes is always fresh and different.
Despite all this the best scene in We Own the Night is the opening credits. I say "credits" although there are none. The movie's title is only visible as part of a badge in one of the photos making up the opening photo montage. This montage is composed entirely of period photos of NYC police at work - and a few evocative crime scene shots - from the 70s or early 80s. These photographs tell their own vivid and intriguing tales, with the faces looking out from some of them, the perfectly captured moments of real life, real police, real criminals, drug paraphernalia. You can almost smell some of the rooms, the stink of sweat and cigarettes. The photos are all black & white, full of subtly textured greys, and reminiscent in many cases of the work of legendary crime scene photographer Weegee. An instrumental, loungey lite-jazz reading of "I'll Be Seeing You" by Jackie Gleason's Orchestra plays over the top, its elegiac sadness counterpointing the bleak starkness of some of the images. Its a strangely potent sequence, and a reminder of the unequivocal power of the still photograph to capture an instant. It sets an aesthetic standard the rest of the film has significant trouble reaching, though Gray and his excellent cast give it a good go.
James Gray's third film as writer-director, We Own the Night, feels generally a little too familiar. It covers territory audiences know well from a clutch of other films - New York Cops hunting down a drug ring, a man caught between friends and family, loyalty, violence, the dark streets of the American city in the past three decades, guilt, justice, revenge. You've seen it all before. You've seen it a few time sin the last decade, in fact. You've seen American Gangster or The Departed. We Own the Night is like a younger brother to those two films - its stars are less starry, its director less of a name, its budget and running time obviously less inflated.
Gray is a true auteur - he has written and directed each of his films, and they share his thematic concerns. He is interested in family, in violence, in guilt and responsibility. He is a gifted director. Each of the films is directed with a confidence and inventiveness that is remarkably assured. The problem seems to lie with his writing, which can be uneven. He writes some beautiful scenes - sparkling dialogue and powerful emotions brought to the surface, realistically and painfully - but also some real clunkers. The plotting - particularly in We Own the Night- can seem horribly second-hand and derivative. When in doubt, resort to violence, seems to be Gray's way. But his characters can ground the films with their painful dilemmas, each of them conflicted and agonised by their lives.
What is most distinctive is Gray's seriousness. Each of his films is sombre and darkly atmospheric, intent on its own little tragedy. The Yards seems bent on turning itself into a mini-Godfather with its seeming mission to look like a John Alton-shot film noir in colour and its operatic heights of tension and release. Indeed, each of his films is beautifully lensed, and Gray deserves praise for his classicism, his determination to shoot films uncorrupted by modern editing styles and lighting techniques. It gives his work a timeless look, warm and lived-in yet never shrinking from the grubbiness of the urban underbelly they observe. His skill as a director is most apparent in the impact each of his set-pieces delivers. We Own the Night, for instance, delivers a couple of stunning scenes. The first, a deafening, bloody police raid on a drug factory in a tenement building, is preceded by an equally impressive build-up of tension as one character feels that exposure as a police mole is close. The second is a car chase along a highway in a rainstorm. Here Gray's cutting and shot choice is exemplary yet never predictable, keeping the scene exciting yet intimate, horrific and convincingly confusing as it is. The film's finale - a bracingly suspenseful and visceral pursuit on foot through a field of reeds - is another example of his gift for set-pieces, as is the central fist-fight in The Yards, perhaps the most realistic ever put on film. He is adept at evoking clammy fear, the dread of discovery, the adrenaline of sudden violence, always a you-are-there feeling of inhabiting a scene, perhaps because his approach to such scenes is always fresh and different.
Despite all this the best scene in We Own the Night is the opening credits. I say "credits" although there are none. The movie's title is only visible as part of a badge in one of the photos making up the opening photo montage. This montage is composed entirely of period photos of NYC police at work - and a few evocative crime scene shots - from the 70s or early 80s. These photographs tell their own vivid and intriguing tales, with the faces looking out from some of them, the perfectly captured moments of real life, real police, real criminals, drug paraphernalia. You can almost smell some of the rooms, the stink of sweat and cigarettes. The photos are all black & white, full of subtly textured greys, and reminiscent in many cases of the work of legendary crime scene photographer Weegee. An instrumental, loungey lite-jazz reading of "I'll Be Seeing You" by Jackie Gleason's Orchestra plays over the top, its elegiac sadness counterpointing the bleak starkness of some of the images. Its a strangely potent sequence, and a reminder of the unequivocal power of the still photograph to capture an instant. It sets an aesthetic standard the rest of the film has significant trouble reaching, though Gray and his excellent cast give it a good go.
Saturday, 13 September 2014
KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
(Ridley Scott, 2005)
Balian: You go to certain death.
Templar: All death is certain.
If Kingdom of Heaven - the Directors Cut, not the manifestly inferior theatrical version, which is 45 minutes shorter - starred anybody other than Orlando Bloom in the lead role, it would be one of Ridley Scott's very best films. Bloom has never been better than in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, where he is required mainly to seem unearthly and beautiful - Legolas doesn't really have any personality in the realistic sense. He is a heroic ideal, and Bloom, blessed with his good looks, manages that without difficulty. In much of his other work he is similarly required to look pretty, but he is hopelessly out of his depth when asked to express any actual emotion. In Kingdom of Heaven, where he is asked to handle huge emotions - grief, despair, love - he is blank-faced. His single expression is a sort of empty smoulder - he seems to have walked off the set of an aftershave commercial. His character, Balian, is driven through the film by a search for his faith, yet Bloom looks like he's searching for his iPod and isn't all that bothered if he finds it or not.
It's a pity, because he is surrounded by a truly classy cast of mainly European supporting actors, most of whom seem totally at home in the Medieval World Scott painstakingly, beautifully creates. Liam Neeson, David Thewlis, Jeremy Irons, Kevin McKidd, Martin Csokas and Brendan Gleeson all have big masculine presences, and Bloom seems dwarfed by all of them in his shared scenes. Eva Green is a fascinatingly complicated leading lady here, and Edward Norton offers a somehow Brando-esque but very effective voice performance as the masked Leper-King, Baldwin.
This is a complex, thematically ambitious epic, spending much of its running time detailing the political and religious divisions which beset the factions within the Holy Land during the Crusades. It is also an exploration of ideology and of the difference between faith and religion. That could be dull, but screenwriter William Monaghan, who wrote the dazzling dialogue for The Departed, shows that he can do the same for a vastly different world here, though there are a few clunky exchanges. Its contemporary resonances, dealing as it does with a battle in the Middle East between Christian and Muslim forces, are unavoidable and well-handled. It is fair-handed, with Saladin, the Commander of the Saracens, played by the charismatic Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud, emerging as one of the best and most likeable characters, while many of the Christians are plainly rabid animals using their religion as justification for slaughter.
The real glory of this film, though, is Ridley Scott's direction. It seems a synthesis of much of what he has done before - the reconstruction of Old Worlds in Gladiator and 1492 and The Duellists is here attempted on an even bigger canvas, and it is achieved more vividly and more beautifully than in any of those films. The ferocity of the battle scenes in Gladiator and Black Hawk Down is replicated here, again on a bigger, more beautiful scale. The contrast between the wintery mud and misery of Continental Europe in that era with the exotic melting pot of the Holy Land is brilliantly evoked. Indeed, the whole thing is textural masterpiece, always sensuous and visceral, with moments of pure poetry scattered throughout the story.
Its commercial failure is still no surprise. Aside from the gaping hole at its heart where a leading man should be, it's flaws are obvious and even its strengths are partially uncommercial - it is more complex and adult than any of the other modern epics, its conclusions about religion and war too ambiguous for popular acceptance. If Gladiator used a simple revenge story to great effect, Kingdom of Heaven has no such basic structure, its tale of a man searching for faith and redemption far too interior to drive such a big narrative emotionally. The film it most reminds me of is Anthony Mann's The Fall of the Roman Empire, another Epic with a miscast leading man and a downbeat, complex tone.
Balian: You go to certain death.
Templar: All death is certain.
If Kingdom of Heaven - the Directors Cut, not the manifestly inferior theatrical version, which is 45 minutes shorter - starred anybody other than Orlando Bloom in the lead role, it would be one of Ridley Scott's very best films. Bloom has never been better than in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, where he is required mainly to seem unearthly and beautiful - Legolas doesn't really have any personality in the realistic sense. He is a heroic ideal, and Bloom, blessed with his good looks, manages that without difficulty. In much of his other work he is similarly required to look pretty, but he is hopelessly out of his depth when asked to express any actual emotion. In Kingdom of Heaven, where he is asked to handle huge emotions - grief, despair, love - he is blank-faced. His single expression is a sort of empty smoulder - he seems to have walked off the set of an aftershave commercial. His character, Balian, is driven through the film by a search for his faith, yet Bloom looks like he's searching for his iPod and isn't all that bothered if he finds it or not.
It's a pity, because he is surrounded by a truly classy cast of mainly European supporting actors, most of whom seem totally at home in the Medieval World Scott painstakingly, beautifully creates. Liam Neeson, David Thewlis, Jeremy Irons, Kevin McKidd, Martin Csokas and Brendan Gleeson all have big masculine presences, and Bloom seems dwarfed by all of them in his shared scenes. Eva Green is a fascinatingly complicated leading lady here, and Edward Norton offers a somehow Brando-esque but very effective voice performance as the masked Leper-King, Baldwin.
This is a complex, thematically ambitious epic, spending much of its running time detailing the political and religious divisions which beset the factions within the Holy Land during the Crusades. It is also an exploration of ideology and of the difference between faith and religion. That could be dull, but screenwriter William Monaghan, who wrote the dazzling dialogue for The Departed, shows that he can do the same for a vastly different world here, though there are a few clunky exchanges. Its contemporary resonances, dealing as it does with a battle in the Middle East between Christian and Muslim forces, are unavoidable and well-handled. It is fair-handed, with Saladin, the Commander of the Saracens, played by the charismatic Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud, emerging as one of the best and most likeable characters, while many of the Christians are plainly rabid animals using their religion as justification for slaughter.
The real glory of this film, though, is Ridley Scott's direction. It seems a synthesis of much of what he has done before - the reconstruction of Old Worlds in Gladiator and 1492 and The Duellists is here attempted on an even bigger canvas, and it is achieved more vividly and more beautifully than in any of those films. The ferocity of the battle scenes in Gladiator and Black Hawk Down is replicated here, again on a bigger, more beautiful scale. The contrast between the wintery mud and misery of Continental Europe in that era with the exotic melting pot of the Holy Land is brilliantly evoked. Indeed, the whole thing is textural masterpiece, always sensuous and visceral, with moments of pure poetry scattered throughout the story.
Its commercial failure is still no surprise. Aside from the gaping hole at its heart where a leading man should be, it's flaws are obvious and even its strengths are partially uncommercial - it is more complex and adult than any of the other modern epics, its conclusions about religion and war too ambiguous for popular acceptance. If Gladiator used a simple revenge story to great effect, Kingdom of Heaven has no such basic structure, its tale of a man searching for faith and redemption far too interior to drive such a big narrative emotionally. The film it most reminds me of is Anthony Mann's The Fall of the Roman Empire, another Epic with a miscast leading man and a downbeat, complex tone.
Tuesday, 26 August 2014
TROY
(Wolfgang Petersen, 2004)
Has ever a major actor been quite so uncomfortable in period or non-American roles as Brad Pitt? Here he just about gets by on an extremely Californian type of sun-kissed buff beauty, but every single time he opens his mouth to speak, this film runs into a big problem; its protagonist - the legendary Achilles - is faintly ridiculous. That is only made more obvious by the fact that his direct opponent and mirror image, Eric Bana as Hector, is a serious, intense, magnetic presence.
Written by David Benioff in what now seems like a shaky dry-run for the sort of believable heroic historical drama he perfected on Game of Thrones, Troy now seems like a commendably old-fashioned sword and sandal epic, filled with lots of talk of honour, politics and the Gods. Only it's never really all that good.
The casting is one problem. Not only is Pitt horrendously miscast, but Diane Kruger , while obviously beautiful, makes a curiously dull Helen, and Orlando Bloom is his wooden, pretty worst as Paris, which robs the relationship meant to drive the entire plot of any interest or emotion. The old British thespians in smaller roles do better; Peter O'Toole and Brian Cox chew scenery (and there's a lot of it to chew on) to good effect as duelling Kings Agamemnon and Priam, Brendan Gleeson is flat-out terrifying as Menelaus, and Sean Bean is so good as a wily, political old Odysseus you find yourself wishing the film was about him instead.
Benioff's script is filled with good ideas. Achilles here is a warrior as rock star, lounging in a tent surrounded by groupies, followed by a cadre of warriors who worship him, but lazy, contemptuous of normal people, with a seeming death wish. That is all undone by Pitt's empty, superficial work, as is his relationship with Brisseus (Rose Byrne), a Priestess who is taken captive.
In contrast, Hector's love for his wife, family and country is simple and believable, which unbalances this narrative precariously (as does the fact that Agamemnon is such an unscrupulous villian, while Priam is just a bit of an earnest fool).
The material that does work is the spectacle, when it has not been spoiled by some shabby cgi. Huge battle scenes are efficiently directed by Petersen, without ever containing anything that is truly special or even memorable. The fighting has obviously been carefully considered, and Achilles moves like a dancer in stark contrast to the heavy armour and forceful strikes favoured by everybody else.
The climax - the arrival of the Wooden horse (nicely designed here) into Troy and all that follows - feels quite rushed, and in any event, the emotional climax has come and gone almost an hour before.
The duel between Achilles and Hector is easily the best thing in the film. So clearly shot and edited it feels like somebody other than Petersen must have been involved, it is visceral and gripping throughout, and the outcome is at least stirring in a way nothing else in this film is.
Has ever a major actor been quite so uncomfortable in period or non-American roles as Brad Pitt? Here he just about gets by on an extremely Californian type of sun-kissed buff beauty, but every single time he opens his mouth to speak, this film runs into a big problem; its protagonist - the legendary Achilles - is faintly ridiculous. That is only made more obvious by the fact that his direct opponent and mirror image, Eric Bana as Hector, is a serious, intense, magnetic presence.
Written by David Benioff in what now seems like a shaky dry-run for the sort of believable heroic historical drama he perfected on Game of Thrones, Troy now seems like a commendably old-fashioned sword and sandal epic, filled with lots of talk of honour, politics and the Gods. Only it's never really all that good.
The casting is one problem. Not only is Pitt horrendously miscast, but Diane Kruger , while obviously beautiful, makes a curiously dull Helen, and Orlando Bloom is his wooden, pretty worst as Paris, which robs the relationship meant to drive the entire plot of any interest or emotion. The old British thespians in smaller roles do better; Peter O'Toole and Brian Cox chew scenery (and there's a lot of it to chew on) to good effect as duelling Kings Agamemnon and Priam, Brendan Gleeson is flat-out terrifying as Menelaus, and Sean Bean is so good as a wily, political old Odysseus you find yourself wishing the film was about him instead.
Benioff's script is filled with good ideas. Achilles here is a warrior as rock star, lounging in a tent surrounded by groupies, followed by a cadre of warriors who worship him, but lazy, contemptuous of normal people, with a seeming death wish. That is all undone by Pitt's empty, superficial work, as is his relationship with Brisseus (Rose Byrne), a Priestess who is taken captive.
In contrast, Hector's love for his wife, family and country is simple and believable, which unbalances this narrative precariously (as does the fact that Agamemnon is such an unscrupulous villian, while Priam is just a bit of an earnest fool).
The material that does work is the spectacle, when it has not been spoiled by some shabby cgi. Huge battle scenes are efficiently directed by Petersen, without ever containing anything that is truly special or even memorable. The fighting has obviously been carefully considered, and Achilles moves like a dancer in stark contrast to the heavy armour and forceful strikes favoured by everybody else.
The climax - the arrival of the Wooden horse (nicely designed here) into Troy and all that follows - feels quite rushed, and in any event, the emotional climax has come and gone almost an hour before.
The duel between Achilles and Hector is easily the best thing in the film. So clearly shot and edited it feels like somebody other than Petersen must have been involved, it is visceral and gripping throughout, and the outcome is at least stirring in a way nothing else in this film is.
Saturday, 12 April 2014
SPIDER-MAN
(Sam Raimi, 2002)
Raimi is a director perfectly suited to comic-book material. He is unafraid of camp; in Spider-Man he and screenwriter David Koepp wholeheartedly embrace some awfully camp dialogue, and it works. He understands the power of pulp imagery, and he knows how and when to use it - unlike some directors who take on the superhero genre and try to make it slick, or beautiful, or arch, Raimi shoots it as brightly-lit, visually exciting pulp. Which is as it should be, and which suits this particular superhero beautifully.
This is an origin story. The familiar origin story of Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire), entwined with that of his villain the Green Goblin (Willem Defoe). It is also a relatively early example of the huge super-hero film; and that means it works in a slightly different way to many of the films that followed it (even its own sequels). It gets its characters and emotional dynamics just right: Maguire is brilliant as Peter Parker, sensitive, bright, unsure of himself, always feeling guilty, and finally exhilarated to cut loose inside his costume. His love for Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) is delicately played and moving by the end of the film, as is the pivotal role played in his emotional growth by his Aunt and Uncle (Rosemary Harris and Cliff Robertson). Less successful is the material about the Green Goblin, which is a bit too camp in places, and lacks the emotional basis of the Spider-Man storyline.
The action scenes benefit from Raimi's fine eye and sense of rhythm, but the effects are occasionally dodgy, and strangely enough, there perhaps aren't quite enough action scenes.
That the final confrontation comes down to a simple slugfest is nicely true to a classic Spider-Man/Green Goblin story, and places the emphasis firmly back on the raw emotions of these characters.
Raimi would go on to perfect his approach to this genre with his next Spider-Man film a few years later.
Raimi is a director perfectly suited to comic-book material. He is unafraid of camp; in Spider-Man he and screenwriter David Koepp wholeheartedly embrace some awfully camp dialogue, and it works. He understands the power of pulp imagery, and he knows how and when to use it - unlike some directors who take on the superhero genre and try to make it slick, or beautiful, or arch, Raimi shoots it as brightly-lit, visually exciting pulp. Which is as it should be, and which suits this particular superhero beautifully.
This is an origin story. The familiar origin story of Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire), entwined with that of his villain the Green Goblin (Willem Defoe). It is also a relatively early example of the huge super-hero film; and that means it works in a slightly different way to many of the films that followed it (even its own sequels). It gets its characters and emotional dynamics just right: Maguire is brilliant as Peter Parker, sensitive, bright, unsure of himself, always feeling guilty, and finally exhilarated to cut loose inside his costume. His love for Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) is delicately played and moving by the end of the film, as is the pivotal role played in his emotional growth by his Aunt and Uncle (Rosemary Harris and Cliff Robertson). Less successful is the material about the Green Goblin, which is a bit too camp in places, and lacks the emotional basis of the Spider-Man storyline.
The action scenes benefit from Raimi's fine eye and sense of rhythm, but the effects are occasionally dodgy, and strangely enough, there perhaps aren't quite enough action scenes.
That the final confrontation comes down to a simple slugfest is nicely true to a classic Spider-Man/Green Goblin story, and places the emphasis firmly back on the raw emotions of these characters.
Raimi would go on to perfect his approach to this genre with his next Spider-Man film a few years later.
Saturday, 31 August 2013
LA MORTE ROUGE
(Victor Erice, 2006)
The film essay as tone poem, Erice working his obsessions into a lovely contemplation of the power of art, memory and time, cinema and imagination.
It recalls Chris Marker in places as the filmmaker whispers his narration, sad and wise, over lovely black and white photographs of San Sebastian in the 1940s. We can just perceive Arvo Pärt on the soundtrack, and Erice's elegant mastery is obvious in how poetically he fits it all together; his voiceover, these tableau and the music eloquently, expressively suggest the themes he addresses.
The subject is his first encounter with cinema. In 1946, at the age of five, he saw Sherlock Holmes and the Scarlet Claw in a now-vanished palatial cinema near the beach in San Sebastian. He was terrified but enraptured, and he reflects on how time has treated that experience, what happened to the filmmakers, why that film was so resonant in a destroyed post-Civil War Spain, and how his memory has nurtured the whole experience.
It is a gently beautiful film, fascinating and moving; Erice is a master.
The film essay as tone poem, Erice working his obsessions into a lovely contemplation of the power of art, memory and time, cinema and imagination.
It recalls Chris Marker in places as the filmmaker whispers his narration, sad and wise, over lovely black and white photographs of San Sebastian in the 1940s. We can just perceive Arvo Pärt on the soundtrack, and Erice's elegant mastery is obvious in how poetically he fits it all together; his voiceover, these tableau and the music eloquently, expressively suggest the themes he addresses.
The subject is his first encounter with cinema. In 1946, at the age of five, he saw Sherlock Holmes and the Scarlet Claw in a now-vanished palatial cinema near the beach in San Sebastian. He was terrified but enraptured, and he reflects on how time has treated that experience, what happened to the filmmakers, why that film was so resonant in a destroyed post-Civil War Spain, and how his memory has nurtured the whole experience.
It is a gently beautiful film, fascinating and moving; Erice is a master.
Friday, 16 August 2013
I KNEW IT WAS YOU
(Richard Shepard, 2009)
Nice little documentary on the career of
John Cazale, whose body of work might be the most consistently high-quality of
any actor ever. He co-starred in 5 films – The Godfather I & II, The
Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon and The Deer Hunter, then died in 1978 before
the last of those films had even been released. Shepard’s documentary is
basically just a load of (excellent) clips of Cazale being brilliant cut with
interviews with his many legendary co-stars and friends.
But it really does help that those friends
include the likes of Al Pacino, Meryl Streep (Cazale’s girlfriend in the last
years of his life), Robert DeNiro, Sydney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John
Savage, and that the clips are from some of the greatest American movies of the
1970s. And it doesn’t hurt either that Shepard interviews articulate
contemporary character actors like Sam Rockwell, Phillp Seymour Hoffman and
Steve Buscemi on Cazale’s influence and impact.
It might feel a little like a glorified dvd
special feature, but it does justice to the talent of an extraordinary actor
and made me want to watch each of his flms again, which seems like mission
accomplished.
Monday, 31 December 2012
JULIE & JULIA
(Nora Ephron, 2009)
Really two movies in one, Ephron's film (perhaps unsurprisingly) adapts two books, twists them together into a sort of French plait, and just about makes it all work. It has the feel of a classic Hollywood entertainment; it's handsome, adroitly mixes drama and comedy, has a couple of strong roles for its leading ladies, and is never less than winning.
The twin storylines are shuffled throughout, usually in blocks of scenes, but occasionally within montages. The first follows legendary American cook/author/television personality Julia Childs (Meryl Streep) as she moves to Europe with her diplomat husband (Stanley Tucci) in the late 1940s, discovers French food and a sort of vocation as a cook and teacher, and begins to write her famous cookbook. The second follows Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a twentysomething on the brink of her thirties in contemporary New York who begins a project blogging an account of her attempt to cook every single recipe in Childs' book in one year.
For Powell, plainly struggling in a job that is a little beneath her after a promising youth, the blog gives her a focus and a vehicle for a writing talent she has almost abandoned, which is contrasted with the innocence and joy of Childs' attempt to become a cook buoyed by her own confident and enormous personality.
The pleasures here, then, are Ephron's often very witty screenplay, and her insistence on grounding the modern scenes in a recognisable - if very bourgeois - world of stressed commuting, tiring jobs, petty marital tensions and dreams that never really came true. Adams and Chris Messina (as her husband) are both charming as a perhaps too-perfect couple but their minor stresses ands problems are believably banal and contrast nicely with the Childs and their wandering across European cities due to his job, and more pointedly, with the spectre of McCarthyism and an inability to conceive a child which are more serious negatives in their married life.
Streep is characteristically fine, offering a great impression of Childs but not at the expense of any emotional subtlety, and Tucci is his usual reliable self, much of their work done against the backdrop of a picture postcard 1950s Paris, all golden sunlight and shuttered windows, again in sharp contrast with Powell's apartment above a Pizza parlour in Queens.
It all ends in blissful happiness and huge success, and is, of course, determinedly slight. But that is beside the point: it works extraordinarily well for the most part.
Really two movies in one, Ephron's film (perhaps unsurprisingly) adapts two books, twists them together into a sort of French plait, and just about makes it all work. It has the feel of a classic Hollywood entertainment; it's handsome, adroitly mixes drama and comedy, has a couple of strong roles for its leading ladies, and is never less than winning.
The twin storylines are shuffled throughout, usually in blocks of scenes, but occasionally within montages. The first follows legendary American cook/author/television personality Julia Childs (Meryl Streep) as she moves to Europe with her diplomat husband (Stanley Tucci) in the late 1940s, discovers French food and a sort of vocation as a cook and teacher, and begins to write her famous cookbook. The second follows Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a twentysomething on the brink of her thirties in contemporary New York who begins a project blogging an account of her attempt to cook every single recipe in Childs' book in one year.
For Powell, plainly struggling in a job that is a little beneath her after a promising youth, the blog gives her a focus and a vehicle for a writing talent she has almost abandoned, which is contrasted with the innocence and joy of Childs' attempt to become a cook buoyed by her own confident and enormous personality.
The pleasures here, then, are Ephron's often very witty screenplay, and her insistence on grounding the modern scenes in a recognisable - if very bourgeois - world of stressed commuting, tiring jobs, petty marital tensions and dreams that never really came true. Adams and Chris Messina (as her husband) are both charming as a perhaps too-perfect couple but their minor stresses ands problems are believably banal and contrast nicely with the Childs and their wandering across European cities due to his job, and more pointedly, with the spectre of McCarthyism and an inability to conceive a child which are more serious negatives in their married life.
Streep is characteristically fine, offering a great impression of Childs but not at the expense of any emotional subtlety, and Tucci is his usual reliable self, much of their work done against the backdrop of a picture postcard 1950s Paris, all golden sunlight and shuttered windows, again in sharp contrast with Powell's apartment above a Pizza parlour in Queens.
It all ends in blissful happiness and huge success, and is, of course, determinedly slight. But that is beside the point: it works extraordinarily well for the most part.
Friday, 7 December 2012
THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD
(Andrew Dominik, 2007)
Can this beautiful piece of poetry really be only Andrew Dominik's second film? It's made with such confidence, such assurance, as to appear the work of some old master, returning to the Western one last time. But then, Dominik's debut, Chopper, was nothing if not assured. And there are other similarities between the two films - both studies of fame and its effect, both centred on complex, disturbed men all too aware of their own myths. Here Dominik recalls the great revisionist Westerns of the 20 year period from the late 60s through the early 80s - the likes of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, McCabe & Mrs Miller, Heavens Gate and Walter Hill's superb take on the Jesse James legend, The Long Riders. His film has the solemnity and seriousness common to those films, the relaxed yet deliberate pacing, the slightly askew characterisation. It is also great enough to stand in their company without suffering by comparison. Yet it also seemed greatly informed by the work of Terrence Malick in its patience and attention to the natural world, in its subtly persuasive focus on psychology.
Based closely on Ron Hansen's fantastic novel - and taking its narration and much of its dialogue verbatim from the book - and exquisitely photographed by Roger Deakins, Dominik has still somehow managed to make a Western with something original to say. For this is at heart the story of an obsessive fan, with more in common with todays world of stalkers and media saturation than the genre iconography may at first suggest. Perhaps the most incisive passages occur after the titular event has passed and we are shown the fate of Bob Ford, as famous in his time as Jesse James ever was, and struggling to deal with it, just as Jesse did. The still-life montages of landscapes and empty rooms, and the daguerrotype-style shots of Jesse in town and nature provide visual poetry to match the lyricism of Hansen's narration, and Pitt and Affleck both do career-best work, the latter in particular an absolute revelation. The delicate score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis and the fine cast of young actors as Jesse's ragtag last gang (Sam Rockwell, Jeremy Renner, Garett Dillahunt, David Schneider) only make it all more expertly calibrated.
The films most interesting quality is its ambiguity - about its characters, most particularly. Pitt's Jesse is self-loathing, unpredictable, paranoid and lucidly aware of the narrowing odds he is facing; nursing a death wish, yet also charming, charismatic and attractive. He chooses Ford to be his killer, grooms him, and in so doing ensures that Ford is the one who has his character assassinated. The event makes Ford famous, yes, but also destroys his life. Ford gains our sympathy despite his creepiness, the ability he has to set people's teeth on edge merely by talking. This ambivalence in the authorial view of the central figures spreads through the narrative until the entire film is hung with it and the certainty of the title seems possibly ironic. The odd, fractured love story at the heart of this film gives it a black little heart which is beautifully and surgically exposed over the course of the precise, superbly textured narrative.
As slow as molasses, maybe, but in this sort of Western, thats a good thing, and Dominick adds his name to the roll-call of directors who have made great Jesse James films alongside the likes of Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller, Phil Kauffman and Walter Hill.
Can this beautiful piece of poetry really be only Andrew Dominik's second film? It's made with such confidence, such assurance, as to appear the work of some old master, returning to the Western one last time. But then, Dominik's debut, Chopper, was nothing if not assured. And there are other similarities between the two films - both studies of fame and its effect, both centred on complex, disturbed men all too aware of their own myths. Here Dominik recalls the great revisionist Westerns of the 20 year period from the late 60s through the early 80s - the likes of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, McCabe & Mrs Miller, Heavens Gate and Walter Hill's superb take on the Jesse James legend, The Long Riders. His film has the solemnity and seriousness common to those films, the relaxed yet deliberate pacing, the slightly askew characterisation. It is also great enough to stand in their company without suffering by comparison. Yet it also seemed greatly informed by the work of Terrence Malick in its patience and attention to the natural world, in its subtly persuasive focus on psychology.
Based closely on Ron Hansen's fantastic novel - and taking its narration and much of its dialogue verbatim from the book - and exquisitely photographed by Roger Deakins, Dominik has still somehow managed to make a Western with something original to say. For this is at heart the story of an obsessive fan, with more in common with todays world of stalkers and media saturation than the genre iconography may at first suggest. Perhaps the most incisive passages occur after the titular event has passed and we are shown the fate of Bob Ford, as famous in his time as Jesse James ever was, and struggling to deal with it, just as Jesse did. The still-life montages of landscapes and empty rooms, and the daguerrotype-style shots of Jesse in town and nature provide visual poetry to match the lyricism of Hansen's narration, and Pitt and Affleck both do career-best work, the latter in particular an absolute revelation. The delicate score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis and the fine cast of young actors as Jesse's ragtag last gang (Sam Rockwell, Jeremy Renner, Garett Dillahunt, David Schneider) only make it all more expertly calibrated.
The films most interesting quality is its ambiguity - about its characters, most particularly. Pitt's Jesse is self-loathing, unpredictable, paranoid and lucidly aware of the narrowing odds he is facing; nursing a death wish, yet also charming, charismatic and attractive. He chooses Ford to be his killer, grooms him, and in so doing ensures that Ford is the one who has his character assassinated. The event makes Ford famous, yes, but also destroys his life. Ford gains our sympathy despite his creepiness, the ability he has to set people's teeth on edge merely by talking. This ambivalence in the authorial view of the central figures spreads through the narrative until the entire film is hung with it and the certainty of the title seems possibly ironic. The odd, fractured love story at the heart of this film gives it a black little heart which is beautifully and surgically exposed over the course of the precise, superbly textured narrative.
As slow as molasses, maybe, but in this sort of Western, thats a good thing, and Dominick adds his name to the roll-call of directors who have made great Jesse James films alongside the likes of Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller, Phil Kauffman and Walter Hill.
Saturday, 24 November 2012
A PERFECT GETAWAY
(David Twohy, 2009)
Writer-director Twohy, who made the fantastically effective sci-fi b film Pitch Black, here demonstrates that his understanding of genre dynamics extend to the more mainstream end of things - in this case a seemingly anonymously generic thriller.
The set-up is almost perfect in its bland familiarity: three couples cross paths in a remote area of Hawaii. The police are hunting a similar couple, wanted for a grisly double-murder in Honolulu, and suspicions are naturally aroused. Tensions and undercurrents crackle between them as they journey through the jungle to a famously isolated and beautiful beach.
This self aware spectacle is all kinds of fun, twisting and turning through revelations and double crosses all the way through, beautifully shot and edited and nicely directed by Twohy.
It plays oh so smartly with audience expectation and genre convention; Twohy knows precisely what should happen, and sometimes he even delivers it. Only upon reflection we realise that what we thought we saw is not what we actually saw.
That might make A Perfect Getaway sound like gimmickry, but it is solidly built upon great characterisation and strong performances: Timothy Olyphant has a great time as a loquacious "American Jedi" ex-Special Forces soldier, Milla Jovovich thrives away from the numbing repetition of fighting zombies in video game adaptations, and Steve Zahn shows he has some range beyond quirky smart-mouths for perhaps the first time ever. There is more there too, if you want it - a telling, well-observed study of coupledom, its compromises and shared understandings, and a believable, authentic portrayal of the weird chemistry of a holiday encounter: instant bonds formed between strangers and the tensions that ensue. Only here that all ends in gunplay, desperate chases through the tropical forest and knives flung through the air.
It is the kind of film that plays well on a first viewing but improves with subsequent watches - its layers and cleverness only truly revealed with an awareness of the final act reveals and reversals. Then it seems hilariously funny in its teasing of the viewer, as well as gripping and enormously entertaining.
Tuesday, 20 November 2012
HUNGER
(Steve McQueen, 2008)
McQueen, in his stunningly accomplished debut, displays an acute understanding of the power of the medium. Its there in the first scene. We follow a Prison Guard - employed in the Maze in 1970s Northern Ireland - through some of the moments of his routine. He bathes his bloodied knuckles in cold water. He smokes a cigarette. His wife makes him a fry-up. He checks his street for potential assassins and the underside of his car for bombs before leaving for work. All of it beautifully composed - the framing and lighting distinctively stylish. That and the sound gives it all texture and a truly sensual reality - the crunch of the Guard's toast is shockingly intimate, the rustle the fabric of a shirt makes as he dresses, the gush of tapwater into a wash basin. All of this means that when the focus shifts to the Republican Prisoners engaged in a dirty protest - not washing, smearing their excrement on their cell-walls, clad only in blankets - we can smell the filth, feel the maggots writhing on the floor. The violence of their beatings is given horrific weight in this film. The focus shifts again, to Bobby Sands, who would lead the hunger strike which would kill him after 66 days. Michael Fassbender is incredible in the role, and the later scenes, where his emaciated body seems to fade away before us, are almost unwatchable in their power and visceral quality. Its a formally brave film - McQueen uses long static shots brilliantly, but mixes them with tight close ups and moments of pure visual poetry. Perhaps the film's bravest gamble is the long central scene of Sands debating his intentions with a Priest (Liam Cunningham), which McQueen films in one ten minute long set-up. This puts the burden on Enda Walsh's dialogue and the two actors, and they are all up to it. It works, giving some context to the otherwise intensely focused story we are shown. It is even-handed, too: the murder of the prison guard while visiting his senile mother in a nursing home is perhaps the most brutal moment in the film. The final moments escape briefly into visual beauty before returning us to the cold, terrible reality of Sands physical collapse and death. Somehow it is too beautiful and exact to be depressing. The control and focus and austerity is reminiscent of Bresson, but the emotion evoked is much rawer than anything in his work. Its severity and formal precision makes most films about the Troubles (including Terry George's solid Some Mother's Son, also concerned with the Hunger strikers) look like contrived Hollywood piffle. McQueen looks a massive talent.
McQueen, in his stunningly accomplished debut, displays an acute understanding of the power of the medium. Its there in the first scene. We follow a Prison Guard - employed in the Maze in 1970s Northern Ireland - through some of the moments of his routine. He bathes his bloodied knuckles in cold water. He smokes a cigarette. His wife makes him a fry-up. He checks his street for potential assassins and the underside of his car for bombs before leaving for work. All of it beautifully composed - the framing and lighting distinctively stylish. That and the sound gives it all texture and a truly sensual reality - the crunch of the Guard's toast is shockingly intimate, the rustle the fabric of a shirt makes as he dresses, the gush of tapwater into a wash basin. All of this means that when the focus shifts to the Republican Prisoners engaged in a dirty protest - not washing, smearing their excrement on their cell-walls, clad only in blankets - we can smell the filth, feel the maggots writhing on the floor. The violence of their beatings is given horrific weight in this film. The focus shifts again, to Bobby Sands, who would lead the hunger strike which would kill him after 66 days. Michael Fassbender is incredible in the role, and the later scenes, where his emaciated body seems to fade away before us, are almost unwatchable in their power and visceral quality. Its a formally brave film - McQueen uses long static shots brilliantly, but mixes them with tight close ups and moments of pure visual poetry. Perhaps the film's bravest gamble is the long central scene of Sands debating his intentions with a Priest (Liam Cunningham), which McQueen films in one ten minute long set-up. This puts the burden on Enda Walsh's dialogue and the two actors, and they are all up to it. It works, giving some context to the otherwise intensely focused story we are shown. It is even-handed, too: the murder of the prison guard while visiting his senile mother in a nursing home is perhaps the most brutal moment in the film. The final moments escape briefly into visual beauty before returning us to the cold, terrible reality of Sands physical collapse and death. Somehow it is too beautiful and exact to be depressing. The control and focus and austerity is reminiscent of Bresson, but the emotion evoked is much rawer than anything in his work. Its severity and formal precision makes most films about the Troubles (including Terry George's solid Some Mother's Son, also concerned with the Hunger strikers) look like contrived Hollywood piffle. McQueen looks a massive talent.
Thursday, 8 November 2012
ADAM & PAUL
(Leonard Abrahamson, 2004)
This modest Irish film is a tragi-comedy which follows 24 hours in the lives of the titular characters, a pair of childhood friends turned junkies, as they wander Dublin in search of money and their next fix. Sounds hilarious, I know. But it maintains an almost Beckettian grim humour from the first scene, when the duo awake in a wasteland behind the formerly notorious Ballymun estate. The tall one - they are never assigned names, and people greet them with "Alright Adam and Paul?" - finds himself glued to a mattress and the first words uttered are "Ah for fucks sake." They swear throughout, as do most of the people they encounter in the course of their day, which is extremely authentic to Dublin. The comedy mainly comes from the small one, who is the slapstick clown of the pair. He is clipped by a moped crossing the street: "Me fuckin leeggg!!" He hurts his hand trying to smash a car window: "Me fuckin hand!!" He throws up by the side of a motorway, he takes an emergency shit crouched in an alley ("I'm not wipin meself with a tayto bag") and he bungles an attempt at shoplifting, then cannot even open the milk carton he has escaped with. He maintains a pathetic, whining tone throughout. And yet he is the more sympathetic of the two, his puppyish eyes and dependence on his friend and constant repetition of "sorry" making him seem absurdly vulnerable and pitiful. He bemoans their life when they are at their lowest: "Why can't things be easy, just for once...and to be lucky?"
There is also comedy in the duo's slow-motion verbal ping-pong, underlined by their slack-mouthed, heavy-lidded, slow-blinking smackhead personas. The tall one is the boss, the thinker, and he carries an air of grim regret and melancholy, as if he knows what he is and is helpless to do anything about it. When they are reunited with their old friend, the now clean Janine (in a lovely, silent moment of imagined mental communion), it is suggested that he may even be the father of her infant child. But he is determined in his pursuit of their next high. He carries on, without looking back, dragging the small one in his wake. They are outsiders, always out of place in company, their smalltalk stilted and awkward. They meet some acquantances in a park and it is like a scene from a wildlife documentary - a pack including children, two women and a watchful alpha male are encountered by these two comedically predatory rogue males. The male, in due course, warns the pair off. But they are never sentimentalised or glamorized. They ruthlessly mug a downs syndrome boy they see waiting for a bus. They are close to stealing Janine's new tv. The narrative is sprinkled with suggestions about their role in the death of Matthew, an old friend and fellow junkie whose funeral they have attended a month before (and whose family they encounter). They seem stunned and unsurprisingly numb at the grief they encounter, their immersion in their own addiction blotting out all else for them. And the film, to its great credit, does not shy away from giving that addction a sort of climax. Adam and Paul do score, and their high is depicted as an extraordinary, blissful rapture. The film's colour palette briefly changes, as does the music, and the screen is aglow for one scene, full of light and vivid imagery. This high is eventually followed by the inevitable consequences, however, and they give the film a moving, low key ending, as do the terrific performances from Tom Murphy and Mark O'Halloran.
Adam & Paul perfectly captures the grey, grimy, litter-strewn streets of Dublin's Inner city, the working class heart that still beats on the outskirts of the tourist-choked area of the centre. Aside from the heroin scene, the colours are muted throughout, the skies overcast, the sunlight hazy and diffuse. Skin tone is mottled, colours lose their allure under the dull weather of an Irish midwinter. Abrahamson is a subtle stylist, seldom moving his camera but choosing his shots economically. He indulges himself with a few moments of hard urban poetry in his many compositions showing Adam and Paul as figures framed against a landscape, whether it be crossing a rain-soaked back-street or begging on a corner. He seems interested in modern Dublin and how it works as a city. Adam and Paul exist in the margins, flitting between mainstream lives. There they encounter a Bulgarian man, allowing Abrahamson to examine the complex relationship the Irish - a traditionally emigrant people - have with the Immigrants who have recently flooded their newly wealthy country. He exposes their prejudices ("Yeah, Our Country," the tall one says. "Fuck off back to Romania") before telling them that Dublin is a shithole, full of Romanians. Earlier, a homeless man has berated a store security guard by yelling "You wouldnt have thrown us out if we were black!" Adam and Paul, though definitely outsiders within Dublin, still see themselves above the foreigners filling its most menial positions, and even Irish people from outside the city - "Fuck off back to the country" they shout to another security guard.
Films set in the World's legitimately great citys often rely on a shorthand. Heres a shot of the Eiffel Tower. Look, its Big Ben, and theres a Red bus. That sort of thing. Nothing in Dublin is as instantly recognisable, except to its inhabitants. Abrahamson steafastly refuses any cheap establishing shot and avoids most recognisable landmarks to emphasise his heroes strange isolation. Until the High, that is, which occurs on one of the Liffey's bridges, and the haunting final scene, when one of Dublin's most recognisable Industrial structures towers in the background in what seems an ironic thumb of the nose at the very idea of such gestures. This contrarian streak is itself a very Dublin trait, and it may have helped Abrahamson make what is the greatest film about the city.
This modest Irish film is a tragi-comedy which follows 24 hours in the lives of the titular characters, a pair of childhood friends turned junkies, as they wander Dublin in search of money and their next fix. Sounds hilarious, I know. But it maintains an almost Beckettian grim humour from the first scene, when the duo awake in a wasteland behind the formerly notorious Ballymun estate. The tall one - they are never assigned names, and people greet them with "Alright Adam and Paul?" - finds himself glued to a mattress and the first words uttered are "Ah for fucks sake." They swear throughout, as do most of the people they encounter in the course of their day, which is extremely authentic to Dublin. The comedy mainly comes from the small one, who is the slapstick clown of the pair. He is clipped by a moped crossing the street: "Me fuckin leeggg!!" He hurts his hand trying to smash a car window: "Me fuckin hand!!" He throws up by the side of a motorway, he takes an emergency shit crouched in an alley ("I'm not wipin meself with a tayto bag") and he bungles an attempt at shoplifting, then cannot even open the milk carton he has escaped with. He maintains a pathetic, whining tone throughout. And yet he is the more sympathetic of the two, his puppyish eyes and dependence on his friend and constant repetition of "sorry" making him seem absurdly vulnerable and pitiful. He bemoans their life when they are at their lowest: "Why can't things be easy, just for once...and to be lucky?"
There is also comedy in the duo's slow-motion verbal ping-pong, underlined by their slack-mouthed, heavy-lidded, slow-blinking smackhead personas. The tall one is the boss, the thinker, and he carries an air of grim regret and melancholy, as if he knows what he is and is helpless to do anything about it. When they are reunited with their old friend, the now clean Janine (in a lovely, silent moment of imagined mental communion), it is suggested that he may even be the father of her infant child. But he is determined in his pursuit of their next high. He carries on, without looking back, dragging the small one in his wake. They are outsiders, always out of place in company, their smalltalk stilted and awkward. They meet some acquantances in a park and it is like a scene from a wildlife documentary - a pack including children, two women and a watchful alpha male are encountered by these two comedically predatory rogue males. The male, in due course, warns the pair off. But they are never sentimentalised or glamorized. They ruthlessly mug a downs syndrome boy they see waiting for a bus. They are close to stealing Janine's new tv. The narrative is sprinkled with suggestions about their role in the death of Matthew, an old friend and fellow junkie whose funeral they have attended a month before (and whose family they encounter). They seem stunned and unsurprisingly numb at the grief they encounter, their immersion in their own addiction blotting out all else for them. And the film, to its great credit, does not shy away from giving that addction a sort of climax. Adam and Paul do score, and their high is depicted as an extraordinary, blissful rapture. The film's colour palette briefly changes, as does the music, and the screen is aglow for one scene, full of light and vivid imagery. This high is eventually followed by the inevitable consequences, however, and they give the film a moving, low key ending, as do the terrific performances from Tom Murphy and Mark O'Halloran.
Adam & Paul perfectly captures the grey, grimy, litter-strewn streets of Dublin's Inner city, the working class heart that still beats on the outskirts of the tourist-choked area of the centre. Aside from the heroin scene, the colours are muted throughout, the skies overcast, the sunlight hazy and diffuse. Skin tone is mottled, colours lose their allure under the dull weather of an Irish midwinter. Abrahamson is a subtle stylist, seldom moving his camera but choosing his shots economically. He indulges himself with a few moments of hard urban poetry in his many compositions showing Adam and Paul as figures framed against a landscape, whether it be crossing a rain-soaked back-street or begging on a corner. He seems interested in modern Dublin and how it works as a city. Adam and Paul exist in the margins, flitting between mainstream lives. There they encounter a Bulgarian man, allowing Abrahamson to examine the complex relationship the Irish - a traditionally emigrant people - have with the Immigrants who have recently flooded their newly wealthy country. He exposes their prejudices ("Yeah, Our Country," the tall one says. "Fuck off back to Romania") before telling them that Dublin is a shithole, full of Romanians. Earlier, a homeless man has berated a store security guard by yelling "You wouldnt have thrown us out if we were black!" Adam and Paul, though definitely outsiders within Dublin, still see themselves above the foreigners filling its most menial positions, and even Irish people from outside the city - "Fuck off back to the country" they shout to another security guard.
Films set in the World's legitimately great citys often rely on a shorthand. Heres a shot of the Eiffel Tower. Look, its Big Ben, and theres a Red bus. That sort of thing. Nothing in Dublin is as instantly recognisable, except to its inhabitants. Abrahamson steafastly refuses any cheap establishing shot and avoids most recognisable landmarks to emphasise his heroes strange isolation. Until the High, that is, which occurs on one of the Liffey's bridges, and the haunting final scene, when one of Dublin's most recognisable Industrial structures towers in the background in what seems an ironic thumb of the nose at the very idea of such gestures. This contrarian streak is itself a very Dublin trait, and it may have helped Abrahamson make what is the greatest film about the city.
Tuesday, 31 July 2012
UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION
(John Hyams, 2009)
John Hyams can really shoot action. Universal Soldier: Regeneration is filled with scenes highlighting this talent, indeed it seems at times designed as a showcase for Hyams' ability to make a familiar fight scene a visceral, almost elegantly flowing sequence.
As such, it's a superior example of the truest brand of modern B-movie, the direct to DVD (DTV) action flick. It stars two DTV giants in Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, reprising their parts from Roland Emmerich's more mainstream 1999 action sci-fi blockbuster.
Van Damme is Luc Devereaux and Lundgren Andrew Scott, both reanimated, augmented and near-superhuman "Universal Soldiers" who are reactivated when an Eastern European terrorist group kidnap their Presidents children and threaten to blow up what remains of Chernobyl's old reactors. The terrorist group are in cahoots with Dr Colin (Kerry Shale) who has created a new, even more powerful brand of super-soldier embodied here by MMA fighter Andrei Arlovski as a brutal, relentless, Terminator-esque presence capable of ceaseless, spectacular violence.
The story exists mainly to move these characters (and the American soldier played by another MMA fighter, Mike Pyle) into position for a series of one-on-one confrontations and face-offs, but it commendably does this with virtually no flab, few poorly-written dialogue scenes, and some terrific use of the amazing Bulgarian location (an enormous, unused iron factory, convincingly standing in for Chernobyl). It also makes good use of it's principle actors; Van Damme has always had a sad-eyed melancholy to his presence, and here he spends the first hour of the film in a fog of sorrowful confusion before busting out the ultra-violence in the last act. Lundgren, on the other hand, is a more intimidating, if mischievous presence, and his character here is given an eccentric twist in his brief appearance which suits the performer.
What suits him (and Van Damme) more is action, and they share an extended fight scene like somethingfrom a Godzilla film, destroying rooms and walls as they go. Arlovski has even more action, and he is a convincingly destructive physical performer, all of his hammering blows and crunching smashes captured precisely by Hyams' camera.
Hyams films much of the action - including a couple of the fight exchanges and a commando attack upon the terrorists - in long, sinuously mobile camera moves, but is not above a more fashionable adherence to rapidly-cut chaos. He retains the ability to keep his material coherent, however, a prized gift in an action director.
His fight scenes are often a mix of impact cuts and mid-shot one-take captures, highlighting both the athleticism of his actors and his understanding of what works best in this sort of film. His understanding of space and movement, allied to the lovely timing of his editing - there are few jarring cuts in the whole film - is what makes these scenes feel so fluid and watchable. His father - solid, occasionally inspired genre craftsman Peter Hyams - acts as his cinematographer here, and the film has a consistent, defined aesthetic throughout which is rare in the DTV field.
Hyams career is definitely worth watching - on the right script, with a bigger budget, he could potentially make a great action film.
Tuesday, 10 July 2012
PRIDE AND GLORY
(Gavin O'Connor, 2008)
Gavin O'Connor doesn't really do original. His films - from drama Tumbleweeds to sports films Miracle and Warrior, to this police corruption drama - hit all the usual, expected beats, feature predictable, familiar characters and plot-points, and generally offer solid storytelling and entertainment. What he does well is emotion. Pride and Glory is a derivative, cliched police procedural, familiar in it's every particular, but, while it never approaches the power and intensity of Warrior, O'Connors best film, it still truly sings at certain points.
That is partly down to O'Connor's style; he works in a gritty, you-are-there register, atmospheric, tonally downbeat and generally realistic, eschewing any flourishes but the occasional touch of visual poetry. There is a definite and pleasing '70s vibe to the material and the approach.
He also casts extremely well. Here he has assembled an impressive array of macho character actors (the likes of Frank Grillo, Shea Wigham and John Ortiz) to back up his leads. Those leads are Edward Norton as Ray, a New York police detective who has been working a desk job following an unspecified trauma from some past raid gone wrong, but finds himself - at the behest of his father (Jon Voight), an alcoholic veteran - working on an investigation into the shooting of three cops during a drug raid. His discovery of serious corruption inside the Precinct run by his brother (Noah Emmerich) leads him into conflict with his brother-in-law Jimmy (Colin Farrell), a rogue dirty cop who does deals with drug lords, arranges hits and tortures innocent people for information.
The leads all relish their big confrontations, but those scenes are part of O'Connor's problem as a dramatist; he seems to think in terms of operatic confrontation, actors screaming as they eyeball one another. It works when the actors are as good as the ones on show here, though the best moments belong to the ever-impressive Jennifer Ehle as the terminally ill wife of Ray's brother. Her silent despair as she watches her sleeping children one night is perhaps the films most piercing moment.
Aside from that, it's very much a collection of scenes reminiscent of other scenes in better movies. Cops bust down doors, cops refuse to be intimidated, cops have regretful conversations with estranged wives. Nocturnal meets occur in deserted industrial areas. The Irish-American mileau of dingy bars, drunken sentimentality and suffocating family is nothng new, but is nicely evoked. The violence is vivid but not especially memorably-staged. The cast are all fine; Farrell and Norton give their all to characters who are limited by generic necessity, Emmerich is as good as he ever is, bowed beneath the weight of his sadness and regret, while Voight powerfully plays another in a long succession of old lions.
At over two hours, it's far too long, with pretensions of saying something about the law and justice, when really it's merely a powerful little family drama with some pulp in its DNA.
Wednesday, 4 July 2012
CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH
(Lu Chuan, 2009)
In his 1961 review of Gillo Pontecorvo's Holocaust drama Kapo, then critic (now much-lauded Director) Jacques Rivette did not summarise the plot or give a close reading of the aesthetics except to describe one scene and more specifically one shot: "Look however in Kapo, the shot where Riva commits suicide by throwing herself on electric barbwire: the man who decides at this moment to make a forward tracking shot to reframe the dead body – carefully positioning the raised hand in the corner of the final framing – this man is worthy of the most profound contempt."
Lu Chuan's City of Life & Death made me think of Rivette's criticism, which is raised whenever a Holocaust film or any film about real-life instances of man's inhumanity to man is released.
This film is a somewhat impressionistic portrayal of the rape of Nanking, one of the great war crimes of the Second World War and a source of continued tension between China and Japan to this day. The first half is an elliptical, almost dreamlike, floating account of the Japanese conquest of the city, full of ferocious battle sequences and unwatchable mass murder. The second half shows the way the Japanese ran the conquered, half-destroyed city: by executing hundreds of civilians, sytematically raping women and throwing children out of windows.
It is often difficult to watch so much unending brutality, and this is where Rivette's criticism is relevant, for Chuan's film is also incredibly beautiful. The sumptuous black and white photography summons up a series of indelible, unforgettable images: small boys playing war with abandon in the ruins, surrounded by corpses, mere seconds after the firefight they just participated in has ended; a chapel full of keening, terrified refugees shrinking from a handful of Japanese soldiers ; the tips of executed mens heads above the sand as their executioners dance around them, flattening the grave.
Chuan is a new sort of Chinese filmmaker, combining the depth and artistry of the 5th generation with the technical mastery of a modern Hollywood director, and his approach here is radical. He does not linger too long on any one character, his narrative always moving along, observing all, context developing as the story progresses. And yet he is even-handed - the film has been massively controversial in China due to the humanity it allows its Japanese characters.
I can't agree with that criticism or with Rivette. This is a profound, magnificent , difficult film.
Tuesday, 3 July 2012
ZODIAC
(David Fincher, 2007)
The film where Fincher grew up.
A tense and engrossing study of obsession and failure, a whodunnit which doesn't really care whodunnit and a policier which meticulously depicts the procedural elements of a serial killer investigation at a crucial point in the 20th century, Zodiac is Fincher's best film. Its also the first where he allows the narrative and themes and characters to take priority over his directorial pyrotechnics. The pyrotechnics, the insane virtuosity, they're still there, they're just better integrated into the film, best seen in a series of remarkable crane shots, and an overhead tracking shot which is breathtaking but doesn't ever pull the viewer out of the story. Instead Fincher focuses on the details and in the process builds a convincing portrait of a time and place as much as he focuses upon the Zodiac investigation. The texture of Zodiac is thick with America in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with the mainly unseen and unremarked upon social and political upheaval of the era. Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhal) works as a political cartoonist and we glimpse some of his work in passing, but he is more interested in Zodiac, as if seeking escape from his own job. His obsessive investigation gives the film its baggy structure, with extended episodes focusing more on the Official Investigation by various Police Detectives and Departments, and a few chilling recreations of the crimes themselves.
We hear suggestions of the schism in American society on a talk radio programme. There are references to the pop culture of the times, too. Detective Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) was the real-life basis for Bullitt, and he is seen attending a special police screening of that other classic portrayal of the SFPD, Dirty Harry (which was partly inspired by the Zodiac case). The soundtrack is full of the music of the period, most of it put to perfect use, in particular Donovan's ever-creepy Hurdy-Gurdy Man - which I don't think I'll ever be able to hear again without thinking of this film, a signal of how well it was used. But mainly we are buried under the details of the case, just like the films protagonists. Each of them is ruined by it, defeated by its blind alleys and dead-ends. Fincher's film is heavy with scenes depicting men talking in offices and on telephones, and yet it manages to build and maintain suspense for two and a half hours. In this it recalls Alan J Pakula's magisterial All the Presidents Men (the deep-procedural aspect also suggested the influence of The Wire, always a good thing). The photography by Harris Savides is frequently beautiful, but it also vividly captures the lighting in the open plan offices of the SF Chronicle and the police department, contributing to the flat, banal tone which suggests the crushing repetitive dullness of the work these men are involved in. David Shire's subtle score is a direct reference to the films of the 70s Zodiac apes. Its few scenes of outright suspense are confidently, expertly staged and handled by Fincher, proving that he is best when holding back. The cast - illuminated by turns from Robert Downey Jr, Anthony Edwards and Elias Koteas - is uniformly great. Most impressive of all, perhaps, is the sidelong way this approaches a Big American subject, its narrative steadily circling a few characters lost in a maze of detail and crumbling because of their inability to find a way out. The film is about the case but also about technology, how we feel about it and how it fails us (there are many references to mimeographing and early fax machines and a key plotpoint hangs upon the expertise of a handwriting specialist), and about the evil that seemed almost to hang in the air in the culture of the 1970s. It possesses a strange kind of density which reminded me of the work of Don DeLillo and Christopher Sorrentino's novel "Trance" (both of which investigate a similar era in US history). The density comes from the aggregation of detail, the depth of characterisation, and the polymathic tangents the narrative constantly threatens to follow before doubling back. All the while, we never lose sight of the evil at the centre of the story, which seems to baffle Fincher just as much as it baffles his characters. In seemingly keeping his focus so narrow, Fincher, together with screenwriter James Vanderbilt, is able to paint a panorama of a 20 year slice of history, and do it beautifully. This is a Great Film.
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