(Matthew Vaughn, 2010)
Aaron Johnson, who does just fine, is wrong for the title role here. A valid comparison would be the casting of Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man. Maguire is geeky-looking, slightly bug-eyed, not too tall or pretty or athletic. He could have been the nerd Peter Parker is meant to be. Johnson, on the other hand, is obviously a handsome boy, and a geeky afro and pair of specs don't really change that. He's also too jocky - tall, broad-shouldered, fit. A young leading man, in other words. Anybody who is cast as a young John Lennon , which is a role requiring a brooding, charismatic, smouldering kind of teen, is wrong for Kick Ass.
Nicolas Cage, on the other hand, finds just the right film for that chihuahua-on-acid energy of his. Here he doesn't feel like he's wandered in out of his bubble of celebrity where its ok to marry Elvis' daughter because hey, you're a big fan and where you should say yes to every film that goes over a certain figure for your salary. Here he feels like he's caught the tone of the film just right, like he even exemplifies it. His Adam West impression is funny for a few seconds, he has plenty of action scene experience, and he doesn't jolt us out of the film with any bizarre line-readings or twitches for once. This and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans in the same year or so constituted a sort of mini-comeback, since squandered.et in New York City, Kick Ass was mostly shot in London, and there are times when the difference between the two cites is all too apparent. London and New York look different, basically. The architecture is different, the street furniture, the shopfronts, the alleyways...Vaughn and his people do well dressing up locations, for the most part, but this New York just feels wrong. It never coalesces into something that feels like a real city, with all its vague locations - lumber warehouse, drug dealers pad in council estate, suburban high school - and for all is references to NYC, the attitude and spirit of the place are utterly absent. It feels plastic. It feels like the generic "Metropolis" which is home to Superman, and is an obvious analogue of New York without being tied to the actual New York in any way. It feels more comic book-influenced then the same city does in Raimi's Spider-Man films. But this is the film that purports to be a realistic view of Super-heroes. Here New York is full of knife-wielding muggers, and there are plenty of darkened alleyways, just like in my 70s Marvels. In some films, geographical uncertainty can work well. David Fincher's Seven, for instance, is set in an unnamed city which we assume is New York for the first two acts of the film. But at the end, as three characters drive out of the city and into the countryside, they drive through the sun-blasted scrub of what can only be California, and the city seems suddenly more likely to be Los Angeles. This small detail shakes an audience a little, rocks its preconceptions and expectations about what it is watching.
I generally hate when films are shot in one place and set in another, though the strange atmospherics of an everycity can be effective in the right hands. Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut was famously shot in a London standing in for New York, while Vancouver finds itself repeatedly impersonating American cities, often badly. Lost is a treasure trove of city masquerades, as Honolulu impersonates everywhere from London to Seoul to LA. But Lost does it either very well or horrendously badly. Either way is somehow better than the just-slightly off attempt made by Kick Ass.
The most interesting material in both comic and film is in the early scenes, before the arrival of Hit Girl and Big Daddy into the narrative. Here Millar and Vaughn take on the concept of the Super-Hero and its application in a cynical, frightened world, but also a scattershot approach to modern culture, from viral video to cash-in merchandising. Then Hit Girl and Big Daddy show up, and it all turns into a big ridiculous stupidly entertaining action scene. Betraying the influence of both Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns and Jason Pierson's Body Bags, their characters are hilarious and fun and yet they are a big part of some of the film's problems. In the first act, they are somewhat uncomfortably crowbarred in to a story which is not theirs. And then later Hit Girl's central role is undermined by the fact that she is entirely without an interior life - we see her kill and maim and flip and stab, we see her beaten and shot, but we never have the slightest idea what she is thinking or feeling. This reduces her to a pretty black sight-gag, a flash of Japanese anime in the film's DNA, or perhaps a slightly offensive reduction, a character created purely for fanboys, which is never a good thing. Kick Ass himself, by comparison, is all interior life, as his voiceover fills us in on his every thought and aspiration, rendering him without mystery or much nuance. A better actor than Johnson might have given him more shades of despair or horror, but he remains a two dimensional creation throughout.
The film is the very epitome of the modern genre spectacle. In a post-Tarantino world, that means that it is broadly post-modern, casually fascist and directed with an efficiently anonymous "stylish" sheen. It is also more concerned with being fliply funny than with being an effective action film, sacrificing emotional impact on several occasions for a gag. It has a scene with a heavy video game (read: First Person Shooter) reference in Hit Girl's night vision POV massacre, lots of martial arts and insane gunplay, and a soundtrack littered with pop culture ephemera and rescued trash - Sparks, Joan Jett, the Dickies' version of the Banana Splits theme, the Prodigy's sampling of Manfred Mann and a very Tarantino usage of Morricone's "For A Few Dollars More". In other words, it feels like a DVD movie, the sort of film made for Chapter Selection where you can rewatch favourite scenes and moments.
The worst material in the climactic scenes is not from the comic. The comic stays gritty and horrifying whereas the movie finally aims for purest fantasy in a sort of betrayal of its own earliest impulses. Its a shame.
What Kick Ass is, unexpectedly, is a great portrayal of adolescent male friendship. The protagonist says of himself that he "just exists, like most teenagers". He and his two best friends seem like the film's most authentic element, to me. Their warm camaraderie, based on mutual geekiness and constant ribbing, reminded me of my relationship with my friends at that age. Comic shops, sexual frustration, continual teasing of one another, not belonging to any of the teen tribes - all evoked lightly and wittily. Even if the film has little use for this side of its character, its brilliantly done while it lasts, before the costumes and the fight scenes come out.
Showing posts with label Chloe Moretz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chloe Moretz. Show all posts
Friday, 18 December 2015
Friday, 3 October 2014
THE EQUALIZER
(Antoine Fuqua, 2014)
Is it Denzel Washington's unique star persona that makes so many of his vehicles feel like '90s throwbacks? He chooses projects which skew older in terms of target audience than perhaps any other major movie star, and that means that his action-thrillers in particular have a strangely retro "mature" feel. The Equalizer is no different. Over-long and over-familiar, it spends most of it's time setting up the world of Robert McCall, an ex-something-deadly-or-other-for-the-Government who has escaped his old life after the death of his beloved wife and lives an anonymous, normal existence, working in a DIY store.
That is, until, of course, the young prostitute (Chloe Moretz) he has bonded with over his nocturnal visits to a local coffee shop is beaten almost to death by her Russian pimp. So McCall - until now a perfectly normal bloke, albeit one with Serious OCD - confronts the Russian and his gang and, and when they mock him, he kills them all in more or less 20 seconds, shot by Fuqua in a meticulously fetishized slo-mo manner that goes on for about 2 minutes and is undeniably satisfying in time-honoured "they messed with the wrong guy and what a way to find out" style. So the Russian Mob send legendary psycho-fixer Teddy (Martin Csokas, hamming it up as ever) to figure out who has destroyed their Boston operation, which ultimately leads to McCall taking on the Russian Mafia single-handedly.
To the extent that it works at all, The Equalizer works because of Denzel Washington. He gives McCall a mournful intelligence crossed with a subtle sense of humour - not unlike Edward Woodward's performance in the tv show on which the movie is loosely based - and though there is never really any tension (his character is too smart to lose to these gangsters) it is pleasurable watching him kill many many goons in various creative ways.
Fuqua owes his journeyman career to Washington's star power turning Training Day into a huge hit over a decade ago, and he directs with slick, anonymous competence.
Is it Denzel Washington's unique star persona that makes so many of his vehicles feel like '90s throwbacks? He chooses projects which skew older in terms of target audience than perhaps any other major movie star, and that means that his action-thrillers in particular have a strangely retro "mature" feel. The Equalizer is no different. Over-long and over-familiar, it spends most of it's time setting up the world of Robert McCall, an ex-something-deadly-or-other-for-the-Government who has escaped his old life after the death of his beloved wife and lives an anonymous, normal existence, working in a DIY store.
That is, until, of course, the young prostitute (Chloe Moretz) he has bonded with over his nocturnal visits to a local coffee shop is beaten almost to death by her Russian pimp. So McCall - until now a perfectly normal bloke, albeit one with Serious OCD - confronts the Russian and his gang and, and when they mock him, he kills them all in more or less 20 seconds, shot by Fuqua in a meticulously fetishized slo-mo manner that goes on for about 2 minutes and is undeniably satisfying in time-honoured "they messed with the wrong guy and what a way to find out" style. So the Russian Mob send legendary psycho-fixer Teddy (Martin Csokas, hamming it up as ever) to figure out who has destroyed their Boston operation, which ultimately leads to McCall taking on the Russian Mafia single-handedly.
To the extent that it works at all, The Equalizer works because of Denzel Washington. He gives McCall a mournful intelligence crossed with a subtle sense of humour - not unlike Edward Woodward's performance in the tv show on which the movie is loosely based - and though there is never really any tension (his character is too smart to lose to these gangsters) it is pleasurable watching him kill many many goons in various creative ways.
Fuqua owes his journeyman career to Washington's star power turning Training Day into a huge hit over a decade ago, and he directs with slick, anonymous competence.
Wednesday, 19 December 2012
LET ME IN
(Matt Reeves, 2010)
It's really only when you encounter the work of a really natural visual storyteller that the amount of directors who have no real facility with the visual aspect of cinema becomes clear. So many directors are efficient, telling a story by putting the camera in a position which effectively captures the action. Then there are directors who strain themselves seeking a ceaseless stream of beautiful shots - artful composition follows dazzling palette follows ostentatious camera movement...
And then you have someone like Matt Reeves, who with Let Me In, a remake of the superb Swedish horror Let The Right One In from 2008, suggests that he knows exactly how to tell a story with words and moving pictures.
Every shot in this film is beautiful in one way or other. Greig Fraser, the cinematographer, has been doing some stunning work lately, but Let Me In might remain his loveliest performance behind the camera. Reeves combines that beauty with a pleasing economy - he chooses the best shots to move his story forward, and each shot follows the last with clockwork precision. Thats not to say the storytelling here is predictable. On the contrary, its often surprising, even thrilling in its arty emphasis upon atmospherics and mood. All this, and there is even a little visual poetry in the films portrayal of wintry Los Alamos, mostly by night, the snow reflecting various sickly shades of yellow and green.
The plot simplifies and pares down what Alfredson's original took from the source novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, and in doing so, for me, fractionally surpasses that film. This may lack the genuine sense of otherness in the Swedish version, but it is more melancholy, more morally complex and more frightening.
The story is the same: in Los Alamos in the early 1980s, a lonely, horrendously bullied boy, Owen (Kody Smit-McPhee) meets his strange new neighbour, Abby (Chloë Moretz), who has recently arrived with an older man who appears to be her father (Richard Jenkins). At the same time a local Police Detective (Elias Koteas) is investigating the murder of a local youth, found hanging from a tree, all his blood drained from his body. As Owen and Abby grow closer, he learns that she doesn't feel the cold, never comes out in the daytime, and doesn't eat any normal food...
Using vampirism as a metaphor for the pains of adolescence isn't a new idea, but it is particularly well done here. The bullying in this film is portrayed with real authenticity - it is awful, terrifying and senseless - and that, together with Smit-McPhee's understated, numbed performance, gives the seemingly minor tribulations of Owen's home and school life great power. The tension in each of the scenes where he is confronted by the bullies is brutal, giving the more outlandish scenes of the supernatural a very different, eerie charge. Reeves pulls off a couple of stunning set pieces: the scene where everything goes wrong for Jenkins' character on a trip to harvest some blood is magnificent; thrillingly executed and extremely clever in conception, and the swimming pool climax is similarly masterly.
The '80s are subtly evoked, the performances are all quietly excellent and the tension established in the prologue never really lessens, right up to the epilogue, which is beautifully ambiguous and tinged with melancholy.
It's really only when you encounter the work of a really natural visual storyteller that the amount of directors who have no real facility with the visual aspect of cinema becomes clear. So many directors are efficient, telling a story by putting the camera in a position which effectively captures the action. Then there are directors who strain themselves seeking a ceaseless stream of beautiful shots - artful composition follows dazzling palette follows ostentatious camera movement...
And then you have someone like Matt Reeves, who with Let Me In, a remake of the superb Swedish horror Let The Right One In from 2008, suggests that he knows exactly how to tell a story with words and moving pictures.
Every shot in this film is beautiful in one way or other. Greig Fraser, the cinematographer, has been doing some stunning work lately, but Let Me In might remain his loveliest performance behind the camera. Reeves combines that beauty with a pleasing economy - he chooses the best shots to move his story forward, and each shot follows the last with clockwork precision. Thats not to say the storytelling here is predictable. On the contrary, its often surprising, even thrilling in its arty emphasis upon atmospherics and mood. All this, and there is even a little visual poetry in the films portrayal of wintry Los Alamos, mostly by night, the snow reflecting various sickly shades of yellow and green.
The plot simplifies and pares down what Alfredson's original took from the source novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, and in doing so, for me, fractionally surpasses that film. This may lack the genuine sense of otherness in the Swedish version, but it is more melancholy, more morally complex and more frightening.
The story is the same: in Los Alamos in the early 1980s, a lonely, horrendously bullied boy, Owen (Kody Smit-McPhee) meets his strange new neighbour, Abby (Chloë Moretz), who has recently arrived with an older man who appears to be her father (Richard Jenkins). At the same time a local Police Detective (Elias Koteas) is investigating the murder of a local youth, found hanging from a tree, all his blood drained from his body. As Owen and Abby grow closer, he learns that she doesn't feel the cold, never comes out in the daytime, and doesn't eat any normal food...
Using vampirism as a metaphor for the pains of adolescence isn't a new idea, but it is particularly well done here. The bullying in this film is portrayed with real authenticity - it is awful, terrifying and senseless - and that, together with Smit-McPhee's understated, numbed performance, gives the seemingly minor tribulations of Owen's home and school life great power. The tension in each of the scenes where he is confronted by the bullies is brutal, giving the more outlandish scenes of the supernatural a very different, eerie charge. Reeves pulls off a couple of stunning set pieces: the scene where everything goes wrong for Jenkins' character on a trip to harvest some blood is magnificent; thrillingly executed and extremely clever in conception, and the swimming pool climax is similarly masterly.
The '80s are subtly evoked, the performances are all quietly excellent and the tension established in the prologue never really lessens, right up to the epilogue, which is beautifully ambiguous and tinged with melancholy.
Thursday, 8 December 2011
HUGO
(Martin Scorsese, 2011)
If you love cinema, its hard to see how this film will fail to move you. For here is one of Scorsese's hymns to the power of cinema itself, a celebration of the magic of movies, the power they possess to bring dreams to life. Usually he infuses his documentaries on film - one on American Cinema, one on Italian - with his wonder and enthusiasm, but the subject matter of Hugo allows him to fill this film with the emotion of his own relationship with the medium, and in doing so the last act acquires a thrilling, almost awed sense of excitement as Scorsese does away with framing devices and simply shows us some of the work of George Melies, that pioneer of early fantasy cinema.
The framing device is a kids film; the story of Hugo Cabret, a young orphan living in a Paris Train Station in the 1920s. He resides in secret quarters in the ceiling, moves around inside the Walls, spying on the merchants who man the shops and keeping the clocks running. While trying to fix an automaton as a way to reconnect with his recently-deceased father he becomes involved with the mysterious and grumpy old man who owns the toy kiosk, which eventually leads to the magic of cinema and Melies.
In many ways this plays like the sort of thing Tim Burton would make. Slightly less gothic, perhaps, yet set in a detailed fantasy-world version of the past, with an overtly stylised aesthetic evident in the design, costumes and photography which - together with the need for a Steady supply of 3D effects - means Scorsese indulges in many pointless vertiginous swoops of his camera through space. The pallette is a little familiar; all rusty yellows and marine blues, and the editing is often sloppy, the entire film overlong.
It does feature some superb cinematic storytelling from Scorsese, in the scenes where we see the life of the station from Hugo's point of view in sequences reminiscent of Hitchcock's Rear Window. There are plenty of laughs here, many of them courtesy of Sacha Baron Cohen, who finds just the right pitch between realism and cartoon comedy for his character, the villain of the piece for so long, yet one who remains complex and sympathetic.
Yet Scorsese ensures that the comic tone and the derring-do necessary in a Childrens adventure don't prevent the hefty emotional kick of the climax, which plays upon themes of memory and creativity and rests upon the invention of Melies for its visual quality.
The cast, peopled mainly by strong British talent - Christopher Lee, Emily Mortimer, Ray Winstone - in even the smallest roles are generally strong, though the young lead, Asa Butterfield, overacts horrendously throughout.
If you love cinema, its hard to see how this film will fail to move you. For here is one of Scorsese's hymns to the power of cinema itself, a celebration of the magic of movies, the power they possess to bring dreams to life. Usually he infuses his documentaries on film - one on American Cinema, one on Italian - with his wonder and enthusiasm, but the subject matter of Hugo allows him to fill this film with the emotion of his own relationship with the medium, and in doing so the last act acquires a thrilling, almost awed sense of excitement as Scorsese does away with framing devices and simply shows us some of the work of George Melies, that pioneer of early fantasy cinema.
The framing device is a kids film; the story of Hugo Cabret, a young orphan living in a Paris Train Station in the 1920s. He resides in secret quarters in the ceiling, moves around inside the Walls, spying on the merchants who man the shops and keeping the clocks running. While trying to fix an automaton as a way to reconnect with his recently-deceased father he becomes involved with the mysterious and grumpy old man who owns the toy kiosk, which eventually leads to the magic of cinema and Melies.
In many ways this plays like the sort of thing Tim Burton would make. Slightly less gothic, perhaps, yet set in a detailed fantasy-world version of the past, with an overtly stylised aesthetic evident in the design, costumes and photography which - together with the need for a Steady supply of 3D effects - means Scorsese indulges in many pointless vertiginous swoops of his camera through space. The pallette is a little familiar; all rusty yellows and marine blues, and the editing is often sloppy, the entire film overlong.
It does feature some superb cinematic storytelling from Scorsese, in the scenes where we see the life of the station from Hugo's point of view in sequences reminiscent of Hitchcock's Rear Window. There are plenty of laughs here, many of them courtesy of Sacha Baron Cohen, who finds just the right pitch between realism and cartoon comedy for his character, the villain of the piece for so long, yet one who remains complex and sympathetic.
Yet Scorsese ensures that the comic tone and the derring-do necessary in a Childrens adventure don't prevent the hefty emotional kick of the climax, which plays upon themes of memory and creativity and rests upon the invention of Melies for its visual quality.
The cast, peopled mainly by strong British talent - Christopher Lee, Emily Mortimer, Ray Winstone - in even the smallest roles are generally strong, though the young lead, Asa Butterfield, overacts horrendously throughout.
Monday, 17 October 2011
TEXAS KILLING FIELDS
(Ami Canaan Mann, 2011)
Odd that Mann so obviously invites comparison with the work of her father - and producer here - Michael Mann, by choosing to work in the genre with which he is best associated, Crime, with this noirish modern procedural.
Her style cribs from his too, a risky influence, given that attempts to copy such a distinctive style leaves certain directors with films which resemble nothing so much as television drama. Mann, while lacking the acute visual poetry of her father's superior eye, displays enough talent here to avoid that. While she likes to use inserts and near-abstract cutaways to begin scenes in place of establishing shots, just as Michael does, she directs scenes with a muscular confidence and fine sense of rhythm and timing absent from the work of many of his imitators.
This story suits her, with a very masculine sensibility at play following two Texan Detectives working on possibly interlinked cases of abducted and murdered girls in the Industrial backwater of Texas City. There is little exposition early on and we piece together the relationships and backstory as we go.
Little humour here, either, everybody furrowed of brow and intense of gaze. This is the kind of film where the cops return home at night and instead of watching tv or playing xbox, they brood intensely in the kitchen or grimly watch the rain. Though this makes for a few feverish, near self-parodic moments, it does help to build the tension, which rises steadily throughout the film. Indeed, Mann's talent is best discerned in mood, with an impressively sustained atmosphere of sweaty suspense and an indelibly textured portrayal of place; from the eerie alien landscape of the killing fields to the bleak industrial structures on the edge of town.
Her work with actors is less assured, but much of that is down to the material. These characters are largely one-note, constrained by the film's obsession with a single, dreadful case.
Sam Worthington is fine as the younger Detective, with plenty of scope to fume and bristle, while Jeffrey Dean Morgan's more soulful side is indulged by his character's missionary suffering. Stephen Graham registers vividly in just a few scenes, while Jessica Chastain is required to be angry in her every moment. All are overwhelmed by the mounting mood of foreboding and the shadowy blacks of the photography.
The plotting is mostly predictable but Mann enlivens proceedings with a couple of viscerally impressive set pieces.
Odd that Mann so obviously invites comparison with the work of her father - and producer here - Michael Mann, by choosing to work in the genre with which he is best associated, Crime, with this noirish modern procedural.
Her style cribs from his too, a risky influence, given that attempts to copy such a distinctive style leaves certain directors with films which resemble nothing so much as television drama. Mann, while lacking the acute visual poetry of her father's superior eye, displays enough talent here to avoid that. While she likes to use inserts and near-abstract cutaways to begin scenes in place of establishing shots, just as Michael does, she directs scenes with a muscular confidence and fine sense of rhythm and timing absent from the work of many of his imitators.
This story suits her, with a very masculine sensibility at play following two Texan Detectives working on possibly interlinked cases of abducted and murdered girls in the Industrial backwater of Texas City. There is little exposition early on and we piece together the relationships and backstory as we go.
Little humour here, either, everybody furrowed of brow and intense of gaze. This is the kind of film where the cops return home at night and instead of watching tv or playing xbox, they brood intensely in the kitchen or grimly watch the rain. Though this makes for a few feverish, near self-parodic moments, it does help to build the tension, which rises steadily throughout the film. Indeed, Mann's talent is best discerned in mood, with an impressively sustained atmosphere of sweaty suspense and an indelibly textured portrayal of place; from the eerie alien landscape of the killing fields to the bleak industrial structures on the edge of town.
Her work with actors is less assured, but much of that is down to the material. These characters are largely one-note, constrained by the film's obsession with a single, dreadful case.
Sam Worthington is fine as the younger Detective, with plenty of scope to fume and bristle, while Jeffrey Dean Morgan's more soulful side is indulged by his character's missionary suffering. Stephen Graham registers vividly in just a few scenes, while Jessica Chastain is required to be angry in her every moment. All are overwhelmed by the mounting mood of foreboding and the shadowy blacks of the photography.
The plotting is mostly predictable but Mann enlivens proceedings with a couple of viscerally impressive set pieces.
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