(Tom McCarthy, 2015)
Spotlight has a great real-life story as raw material. It also has an outstanding cast of character actors and movie stars all committing fearlessly to this treatment of that story. What it does not have is a writer-director with any real feel for cinema.
That's not to say there is nothing to recommend in Spotlight; it is an engrossing, beautifully-acted procedural, with plenty of finely-observed details that bring the story and world to life. It's screenplay has some nice moments and a few fine characters.
Previous true-life procedurals like All the Presidents Men and the Insider combined sharp scripts and great actors with bravura direction. It's just that I don't think McCarthy is capable of "bravura". He is fantastic with actors, and this film is really well paced, giving out just enough exposition to keep an audience interested but never enough to slow things down so much that they might become bored.
The story follows a specialist team of reporters at the Boston Globe as they investigate a story of the Catholic Church and it's decade-long cover-up of paedophile priests. Those reporters are played by the likes of Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams while Liev Schrieber appears as the new Editor of the Paper, an outsider and Jew, who pushes for the story to the displeasure of most of the city, it seems.
McCarthy shoots it all like it's television. From 1997. Flat, "realistic" lighting, dull blocking and compositions. The camera moves little, and never with any real sense of purpose, either thematic or aesthetic. It feels as if he has learned to direct from a book of How to Direct. Directing: a Fools Guide, perhaps?
It's a shame, because this could and should be an important film about a hugely controversial topic. Instead it is a mediocrity; never bad - its far too tasteful for that - but never great either.
Showing posts with label Liev Schrieber. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Liev Schrieber. Show all posts
Sunday, 27 December 2015
Saturday, 30 November 2013
THE LAST DAYS ON MARS
(Ruairí Robinson, 2013)
One of those genre films that plays mainly like a compendium of memorable moments from other genre movies, this lowish budget sci-fi horror just about has enough merit to stand alone as an efficient piece of pulp hokum. That is mainly down to director Robinson, whose style is tough, direct and pleasingly classical, together with an impressive cast in roles that seem underwritten.
The plot focuses on a group of astronauts entering their last 24 hours stationed on a Mars base where they collect samples and conduct experiments. They are pretty stock types: Elias Koteas is defined by the fact that he is the leader, Liev Schreiber is the closest thing to a stock hero, with his square-jawed insistence on always doing the right thing and his heroic flaw, Romola Garai is the "normal" human being among them, Olivia Williams is the cynical, grumpy bitch, Johnny Harris the weak coward who you know will fold at the worst possible moment, their other colleagues even more forgettable.
Well, of course that last sample-collecting excursion goes wrong, and astronauts are turned into zombies, attacking their friends with power tools and anything else near at hand while the dwindling survivors desperately defend themselves inside besieged labs and tunnels. There is much business in airlocks and worry about spacesuits, and the practicalities of life on Mars - energy sources, dust-storms etc - are dealt with cleverly.
Robinson handles the scares well enough, but it never feels different enough, or distinctive enough to make that sufficient. The early scenes suggest Alien in their concentration on a group of colleagues just doing a job in an extraordinary environment, but once the genre make-up changes, the main influence appears to be John Carpenter's near-perfect The Thing, where paranoid, terrified professionals turn on one another and the dread steadily mounts. But The Last Days on Mars is nowhere near as good as those films, even when it finds the right pitch and tone as its flawed, frightened characters struggle to deal with what is happening.
The cast make these scenes work, and the film is satisfyingly bleak in its unsentimental equanimity about disposing of characters, and has a nicely ambiguous ending. With the right script, Robinson could do good work in genre cinema. This ain't the right script.
One of those genre films that plays mainly like a compendium of memorable moments from other genre movies, this lowish budget sci-fi horror just about has enough merit to stand alone as an efficient piece of pulp hokum. That is mainly down to director Robinson, whose style is tough, direct and pleasingly classical, together with an impressive cast in roles that seem underwritten.
The plot focuses on a group of astronauts entering their last 24 hours stationed on a Mars base where they collect samples and conduct experiments. They are pretty stock types: Elias Koteas is defined by the fact that he is the leader, Liev Schreiber is the closest thing to a stock hero, with his square-jawed insistence on always doing the right thing and his heroic flaw, Romola Garai is the "normal" human being among them, Olivia Williams is the cynical, grumpy bitch, Johnny Harris the weak coward who you know will fold at the worst possible moment, their other colleagues even more forgettable.
Well, of course that last sample-collecting excursion goes wrong, and astronauts are turned into zombies, attacking their friends with power tools and anything else near at hand while the dwindling survivors desperately defend themselves inside besieged labs and tunnels. There is much business in airlocks and worry about spacesuits, and the practicalities of life on Mars - energy sources, dust-storms etc - are dealt with cleverly.
Robinson handles the scares well enough, but it never feels different enough, or distinctive enough to make that sufficient. The early scenes suggest Alien in their concentration on a group of colleagues just doing a job in an extraordinary environment, but once the genre make-up changes, the main influence appears to be John Carpenter's near-perfect The Thing, where paranoid, terrified professionals turn on one another and the dread steadily mounts. But The Last Days on Mars is nowhere near as good as those films, even when it finds the right pitch and tone as its flawed, frightened characters struggle to deal with what is happening.
The cast make these scenes work, and the film is satisfyingly bleak in its unsentimental equanimity about disposing of characters, and has a nicely ambiguous ending. With the right script, Robinson could do good work in genre cinema. This ain't the right script.
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