(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 Mark Strong. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mark Strong. Show all posts
Friday, 18 December 2015
Friday, 6 February 2015
KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE
(Matthew Vaughn, 2015)
Kingsman makes sure that you know it has the James Bond films in mind from early on, and there are several explicit references. But this film, based on a comic book, accordingly takes a much more comic book angle on the material, making everything even bigger and broader and sillier than most Bond films usually go. It even has a dig at modern 007 - too serious, apparently - and so here that serious nature is replaced by ludicrous action scenes and some lame gags. It actually bears more resemblance to the recent G.I. Joe films than any Bond movies.
The story follows young petty criminal Eggsy (Taron Egerton) after he is saved from prison by Galahad (Firth), an agent of the titular organisation. Firth sponsors him to enter the recruitment process for a new Kingsman, run by Merlin (Mark Strong) while he investigates the scheme cooked up by Internet Billionaire Valentine (Samuel L Jackson). That scheme involves culling the majority of earth's population, and gives rise to one impressive action sequence, where Firth's dapper, old-school agent kills about two dozen people in a berserker fury. Like all of the action scenes here, that one is almost ruined by an over-reliance on CGI, and throughout the film flirts with being a tasteless and embarrassing mess. It has a particular weakness for the obvious; from the choice of music to the product placement to the action beats to the gags, there is nothing surprising or witty here, just a whole lot of boxes being ticked. Some of those boxes work and are undeniably satisfying to watch; others are cringe-inducing and eye-rollingly dumb.
There is also a streak of class warfare running through the plot, with prole Eggsy taking on the Oxbridge Elite and showing them that a pleb can have what it takes, but even that is messy, what with the way the film fetishises upper-class British culture.
The performances barely matter, but Jackson and Firth have fun, while Egerton does what he needs to do. It is massively overlong, but scattered sequences are enjoyable and funny.
Kingsman makes sure that you know it has the James Bond films in mind from early on, and there are several explicit references. But this film, based on a comic book, accordingly takes a much more comic book angle on the material, making everything even bigger and broader and sillier than most Bond films usually go. It even has a dig at modern 007 - too serious, apparently - and so here that serious nature is replaced by ludicrous action scenes and some lame gags. It actually bears more resemblance to the recent G.I. Joe films than any Bond movies.
The story follows young petty criminal Eggsy (Taron Egerton) after he is saved from prison by Galahad (Firth), an agent of the titular organisation. Firth sponsors him to enter the recruitment process for a new Kingsman, run by Merlin (Mark Strong) while he investigates the scheme cooked up by Internet Billionaire Valentine (Samuel L Jackson). That scheme involves culling the majority of earth's population, and gives rise to one impressive action sequence, where Firth's dapper, old-school agent kills about two dozen people in a berserker fury. Like all of the action scenes here, that one is almost ruined by an over-reliance on CGI, and throughout the film flirts with being a tasteless and embarrassing mess. It has a particular weakness for the obvious; from the choice of music to the product placement to the action beats to the gags, there is nothing surprising or witty here, just a whole lot of boxes being ticked. Some of those boxes work and are undeniably satisfying to watch; others are cringe-inducing and eye-rollingly dumb.
There is also a streak of class warfare running through the plot, with prole Eggsy taking on the Oxbridge Elite and showing them that a pleb can have what it takes, but even that is messy, what with the way the film fetishises upper-class British culture.
The performances barely matter, but Jackson and Firth have fun, while Egerton does what he needs to do. It is massively overlong, but scattered sequences are enjoyable and funny.
Tuesday, 16 December 2014
THE IMITATION GAME
(Morten Tyldum, 2014)
A film where the subject is so intriguing that despite a somewhat bungled execution, the final product is still engrossing and utterly watchable.
A biopic of sorts, focusing on Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch, excellent but operating well within his comfort zone of twitchy aspergers sufferers) during the years of WW2 when he worked at Bletchley Park attempting to break the Enigma code. The film goes into a fair amount of detail about exactly what was involved in that process - Turing's attempts to create a computer which would be able to process quickly enough to work out the code vs his colleagues more old-fashioned efforts at cryptography - while also highlighting his social unease and habit of irritating everyone around him with his superiority and inability to understand basic politeness.
There is a framing device - Turing's arrest in 1950s Manchester for homosexual acts, which would lead to hormone therapy and his eventual suicide - and also a series of flashbacks to a key relationship with his first love at boarding school, and a voiceover which it transpires is Turing telling his story to a police detective, making it all feel a little overstuffed.
There are nice distractions - Keira Knightley is good as Joan Clarke, a colleague and fleeting fiancé, while Mark Strong and Charles Dance are both perfectly cast as Government suits, as is Matthew Goode as the perfect opposite of Turing (charming, smooth, at ease with himself) with whom he must learn to co-exist. It is handsome, has a few nice gags, and is an interesting study in how some of the elements which make Hollywood dramas and biopics so dreadfully predictable and cringeworthy can also be the moments that work, the scenes that move you. The potency of cheap, easy drama, as it were. The eureka moment, for example. The scene where Turing learns of the death of his schoolboy crush. His hamfisted proposal to Joan, and their bitter split.
Jostling alongside all of this are a few interesting ideas about intelligence and responsibility, chief among them perhaps the notion that it is right and in the best interest of all that scientists make decisions for the rest of us about life and death, based purely upon statistics. This is the great fear and paranoia upon which a million sci-fi stories have been based: that the scientists think they know better than us, the bovine herds living oblivious to the way the world works, and that they will ultimately make a decision which will kill or save us all.
A film where the subject is so intriguing that despite a somewhat bungled execution, the final product is still engrossing and utterly watchable.
A biopic of sorts, focusing on Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch, excellent but operating well within his comfort zone of twitchy aspergers sufferers) during the years of WW2 when he worked at Bletchley Park attempting to break the Enigma code. The film goes into a fair amount of detail about exactly what was involved in that process - Turing's attempts to create a computer which would be able to process quickly enough to work out the code vs his colleagues more old-fashioned efforts at cryptography - while also highlighting his social unease and habit of irritating everyone around him with his superiority and inability to understand basic politeness.
There is a framing device - Turing's arrest in 1950s Manchester for homosexual acts, which would lead to hormone therapy and his eventual suicide - and also a series of flashbacks to a key relationship with his first love at boarding school, and a voiceover which it transpires is Turing telling his story to a police detective, making it all feel a little overstuffed.
There are nice distractions - Keira Knightley is good as Joan Clarke, a colleague and fleeting fiancé, while Mark Strong and Charles Dance are both perfectly cast as Government suits, as is Matthew Goode as the perfect opposite of Turing (charming, smooth, at ease with himself) with whom he must learn to co-exist. It is handsome, has a few nice gags, and is an interesting study in how some of the elements which make Hollywood dramas and biopics so dreadfully predictable and cringeworthy can also be the moments that work, the scenes that move you. The potency of cheap, easy drama, as it were. The eureka moment, for example. The scene where Turing learns of the death of his schoolboy crush. His hamfisted proposal to Joan, and their bitter split.
Jostling alongside all of this are a few interesting ideas about intelligence and responsibility, chief among them perhaps the notion that it is right and in the best interest of all that scientists make decisions for the rest of us about life and death, based purely upon statistics. This is the great fear and paranoia upon which a million sci-fi stories have been based: that the scientists think they know better than us, the bovine herds living oblivious to the way the world works, and that they will ultimately make a decision which will kill or save us all.
Saturday, 16 March 2013
WELCOME TO THE PUNCH
(Eran Creevy, 2013)
Twenty years ago an exciting young British director set out to make a US-style crime thriller in London. That city has its own culture of crime stories, and there have been a handful of classic movies about London's gangland, and numerous successful UK TV shows about cops chasing criminals of varying quality. But that young director, named Danny Cannon, went on in promotional interviews about how his film would compete with Hollywood by looking as good as American films did, how it would be as action-packed and stylish, as slick and fast-moving, how it would have a big name US star in the lead. And it did, sort of. Young Americans, Cannon's 1993 crime thriller, does look nice, for the most part. It is well-shot, and slick. Harvey Keitel plays an American Detective who follows an a criminal (Viggo Mortensen) from the States to London. It is not a particularly good film. The script is derivative and tin-eared, and even a little dull. The American style - which isn't really American at all, but we'll get to that in a second - jars in such a British context, even as the script makes a few lame attempts to address this culture clash. But it got Cannon noticed, proved he could make a smallish budget look like a biggish one, and suggested he knew how to shoot action scenes. So a couple of years later he was directing Judge Dredd, and a few years after that he was establishing the visual template for CSI and directing many episodes of that series.
The style he was aiming for in Young Americans was a slick and glossy look, but it had been, partly, created by a generation of British directors who rose to prominence in the late '70s and early '80s - the likes of Alan Parker, Adrian Lyne and Ridley Scott. Each of these directors was able to make his films look beautiful in a particularly cold, clear fashion. They used filters and established rich, impressionistic colour schemes. The sort of heightened realism favoured by Scott in particular became popular in Hollywood, as directors like his brother Tony and the more ambitious and talented Michael Mann worked in similar registers. By the late '90s a certain sort of approach had become the house style for anything produced by uber-producers Simpson and Bruckheimer, who had younger directors like Michael Bay and Simon West produce a series of thrillers and action movies that are all beautiful in their rich colours, visceral texturing and athmospherics, and are all edited within an inch of incoherence.
Eran Creevy - and perhaps executive producer Ridley Scott - plainly wanted Welcome to the Punch to look like one of those films. More specifically he seems to have wanted it to look like Mann's Heat, perhaps the single greatest cops and robbers film of the last few decades. That film has a uniquely beautiful look: filled with aquamarine blues, rich blacks and burnished metallic textures, it captures Los Angeles in Winter, when the air looks thin and the light is a little paler than usual. It is also the work of a director who is a truly matchless visual stylist and a cinematographer (Dante Spinotti) near the top of his game.
Creevy also wants, like Cannon, to transfer the better qualities of the US thriller to a UK-set example of the genre, to make London look like a dangerous nocturnal city, to make East End gangsters and semi-automatic weapons work well together.
So Creevy sets himself a hard task, and he mostly fails. While Welcome to the Punch generally looks nice, it also looks like just another US cop thriller. Filmed around Canary Wharf, it is a film dominated by cold modern architecture; gleaming steel, shining glass and the flat negative spaces of concrete are layered in many of the shots. But it just looks glossy and a trifle desperate. London has a distinctive visual identity beyond the usual tourist cliches, but instead of capitalising on it,Creevy here transforms it into an anonymous modern city.
The storyline recalls Heat too in its tale of a driven detective (James McEvoy) in pursuit of a hyper-efficient criminal (Mark Strong) and the conspiracy they uncover separately before teaming up to solve it. Creevy stages a couple of decent action scenes, but the film seems to features a minimum of two cliches in every situation, and though it delivers most of them with some aplomb, its all just too familiar and routine to be all that interesting. The best scene is an unorthodox, original one, featuring some awkward rising tension in a little English living room as three men hold an old lady at gunpoint to get at her Grandson, but even here Creevy cannot help himself and has to turn it into a slow motion gunfight.
The cast help make it a mostly enjoyable if forgettable diversion. Strong is as brilliant as ever, and Peter Mullan and Johnny Harris give him excellent support, but McEvoy is badly miscast; he never convinces as a hard man cop or as a driven obsessive, unbalancing the narrative too much in Strong's direction.
In addition, there is a fatal whiff of UK TV cop show here. The photography and soundtrack and direction try supremely hard to mask it, but the actors and script cannot: this feels like just another episode in a long-running series on ITV. Tune in next week for more adventures.
Twenty years ago an exciting young British director set out to make a US-style crime thriller in London. That city has its own culture of crime stories, and there have been a handful of classic movies about London's gangland, and numerous successful UK TV shows about cops chasing criminals of varying quality. But that young director, named Danny Cannon, went on in promotional interviews about how his film would compete with Hollywood by looking as good as American films did, how it would be as action-packed and stylish, as slick and fast-moving, how it would have a big name US star in the lead. And it did, sort of. Young Americans, Cannon's 1993 crime thriller, does look nice, for the most part. It is well-shot, and slick. Harvey Keitel plays an American Detective who follows an a criminal (Viggo Mortensen) from the States to London. It is not a particularly good film. The script is derivative and tin-eared, and even a little dull. The American style - which isn't really American at all, but we'll get to that in a second - jars in such a British context, even as the script makes a few lame attempts to address this culture clash. But it got Cannon noticed, proved he could make a smallish budget look like a biggish one, and suggested he knew how to shoot action scenes. So a couple of years later he was directing Judge Dredd, and a few years after that he was establishing the visual template for CSI and directing many episodes of that series.
The style he was aiming for in Young Americans was a slick and glossy look, but it had been, partly, created by a generation of British directors who rose to prominence in the late '70s and early '80s - the likes of Alan Parker, Adrian Lyne and Ridley Scott. Each of these directors was able to make his films look beautiful in a particularly cold, clear fashion. They used filters and established rich, impressionistic colour schemes. The sort of heightened realism favoured by Scott in particular became popular in Hollywood, as directors like his brother Tony and the more ambitious and talented Michael Mann worked in similar registers. By the late '90s a certain sort of approach had become the house style for anything produced by uber-producers Simpson and Bruckheimer, who had younger directors like Michael Bay and Simon West produce a series of thrillers and action movies that are all beautiful in their rich colours, visceral texturing and athmospherics, and are all edited within an inch of incoherence.
Eran Creevy - and perhaps executive producer Ridley Scott - plainly wanted Welcome to the Punch to look like one of those films. More specifically he seems to have wanted it to look like Mann's Heat, perhaps the single greatest cops and robbers film of the last few decades. That film has a uniquely beautiful look: filled with aquamarine blues, rich blacks and burnished metallic textures, it captures Los Angeles in Winter, when the air looks thin and the light is a little paler than usual. It is also the work of a director who is a truly matchless visual stylist and a cinematographer (Dante Spinotti) near the top of his game.
Creevy also wants, like Cannon, to transfer the better qualities of the US thriller to a UK-set example of the genre, to make London look like a dangerous nocturnal city, to make East End gangsters and semi-automatic weapons work well together.
So Creevy sets himself a hard task, and he mostly fails. While Welcome to the Punch generally looks nice, it also looks like just another US cop thriller. Filmed around Canary Wharf, it is a film dominated by cold modern architecture; gleaming steel, shining glass and the flat negative spaces of concrete are layered in many of the shots. But it just looks glossy and a trifle desperate. London has a distinctive visual identity beyond the usual tourist cliches, but instead of capitalising on it,Creevy here transforms it into an anonymous modern city.
The storyline recalls Heat too in its tale of a driven detective (James McEvoy) in pursuit of a hyper-efficient criminal (Mark Strong) and the conspiracy they uncover separately before teaming up to solve it. Creevy stages a couple of decent action scenes, but the film seems to features a minimum of two cliches in every situation, and though it delivers most of them with some aplomb, its all just too familiar and routine to be all that interesting. The best scene is an unorthodox, original one, featuring some awkward rising tension in a little English living room as three men hold an old lady at gunpoint to get at her Grandson, but even here Creevy cannot help himself and has to turn it into a slow motion gunfight.
The cast help make it a mostly enjoyable if forgettable diversion. Strong is as brilliant as ever, and Peter Mullan and Johnny Harris give him excellent support, but McEvoy is badly miscast; he never convinces as a hard man cop or as a driven obsessive, unbalancing the narrative too much in Strong's direction.
In addition, there is a fatal whiff of UK TV cop show here. The photography and soundtrack and direction try supremely hard to mask it, but the actors and script cannot: this feels like just another episode in a long-running series on ITV. Tune in next week for more adventures.
Saturday, 26 January 2013
ZERO DARK THIRTY
(Kathryn Bigelow, 2012)
Bigelow has always been an exceptionally talented director, and to my money, at least three of the movies she directed before her years in a sort of career wilderness (Near Dark, Point Break and Strange Days) can safely be called "great". But at the moment she is probably riding a wave unlike any she has ever before seen in her career. The critical success of the masterfully focused and incisive The Hurt Locker meant that her next project carried a massive level of expectation. And, given the chance to choose her own subject matter, she has moved away from pure genre material and chosen to take on more of an "A-Picture" in the form of Zero Dark Thirty.
This film, written again by her Hurt Locker partner Mark Boal, traces the tortuous attempts of the CIA to find Osama Bin Laden across the Middle East for over a decade. It focuses on Maya (Jessica Chastain, superb) a rookie agent who lands in Pakistan in the early stages of the hunt and stays with it - while others burn out and fall away - until the job is done.
As such, it is absolutely crammed with scenes of people talking intensely in offices and corridors, stuffed with (mostly fascinating) procedural detail and filled with a bewildering array of character actors and familiar faces in even the smallest moments.
Bigelow's previous work has often focused upon characters suffering from an unhealthy obsession with somebody else, but this film is perhaps the ultimate expression of that theme. Maya has nothing in her life but her determined pursuit of "the Sheik", and a personal loss only increases her ferocious determination, yet her colleagues come and go, get promoted and die while she stubbornly follows a single theory.
There are basically three sections. In the first, Maya works with Dan (Jason Clarke), interrogating prisoners and using torture to obtain the smallest scraps of information. These controversial torture scenes are unflinchingly brutal and their very presence stains the efforts of the Americans through the rest of the film. It seems insane to me that anyone could say that this film glorifies torture or credits it with a role in the death of Bin Laden, especially since the crucial lead comes from a piece of information obtained by a combination of trickery and kindness to a detainee.
The second section follows Maya as she works her theory - involving the importance of a single courier, who she believes represents a direct link to Bin Laden - over years of investigation and toil, climaxing in the efforts to find the man in Pakistan.
The final, often suffocatingly tense section focuses on the preparation and execution of the mission to kill "Geronimo" by a team of Navy SEALS (most notably Chris Pratt and Joel Edgerton, but also fleetingly featuring Scott Adkins and Frank Grillo) , all watched by Maya from a distance.
This structure allows Boal and Bigelow to address a few big themes. America and its place in the world is an explicit subject, but just as important is an urgent critique of the way men see - and more importantly, don't see - women in the workplace, and there are numerous interesting themes and ideas cropping up throughout the film, from the bureaucracy of power and embassy politics to the uncertainty of risk assessment and the personal toll taken by obsession.
Bigelow is brilliant at quickly evoking time and place, and this film beautifully fixes the atmosphere of market squares in Abbatabad and teeming streets in Karachi and Islamabad, while also reeking of the smell of Embassy offices and stakeout vehicles. Boal nicely sketches character in few sequences so that characters like Kyle Chandler's station chief, Edgar Ramirez's Field Team leader and Jennifer Ehle's agent are all vividly rendered without any awkwardly expository scenes. The fine cast is obviously helpful here, and the strength of the work from some sensational actors in tiny parts is a big component in the success of the film, as is the score by Alexandre Desplat, which remains subtle until the action amps up at the climax, when it suddenly recalls John Barry in its stirring urgency, and the typically excellent cinematography by Greig Fraser.
And it is incredibly successful. It manages to be both epic, with dozens of locations and characters spread over the course of a decade, while remaining somehow intimate and pared-down. It is 160 minutes long, but it feels pacy and streamlined, is gripping throughout and manages to rise to highs of emotional impact at crucial junctures. It is never dumb or patronising, yet its ambiguities are provocative and mean that it lingers long in the mind after its haunting final scene. It is always clearly a thriller, yet it echoes films like Zodiac, All the Presidents Men and The Insider in generally avoiding the cliches and tics of that genre, and it works just as well as a drama until it shifts into a different gear and setting for the last reel.
That last half hour delivers on the climax supplied by history, and it is an extraordinary set-piece; grittily textured, precisely paced and utterly intense, it reminds us of what a talented director of action Bigelow has always been.
It is only in the last few years that she has been acknowledged as a great director beyond genre, but Zero Dark Thirty makes that abundantly clear. It is the best type of American cinema - accessible and popular yet ambitious and personal. The best mix of arty and entertaining, really, and something of a masterpiece.
Bigelow has always been an exceptionally talented director, and to my money, at least three of the movies she directed before her years in a sort of career wilderness (Near Dark, Point Break and Strange Days) can safely be called "great". But at the moment she is probably riding a wave unlike any she has ever before seen in her career. The critical success of the masterfully focused and incisive The Hurt Locker meant that her next project carried a massive level of expectation. And, given the chance to choose her own subject matter, she has moved away from pure genre material and chosen to take on more of an "A-Picture" in the form of Zero Dark Thirty.
This film, written again by her Hurt Locker partner Mark Boal, traces the tortuous attempts of the CIA to find Osama Bin Laden across the Middle East for over a decade. It focuses on Maya (Jessica Chastain, superb) a rookie agent who lands in Pakistan in the early stages of the hunt and stays with it - while others burn out and fall away - until the job is done.
As such, it is absolutely crammed with scenes of people talking intensely in offices and corridors, stuffed with (mostly fascinating) procedural detail and filled with a bewildering array of character actors and familiar faces in even the smallest moments.
Bigelow's previous work has often focused upon characters suffering from an unhealthy obsession with somebody else, but this film is perhaps the ultimate expression of that theme. Maya has nothing in her life but her determined pursuit of "the Sheik", and a personal loss only increases her ferocious determination, yet her colleagues come and go, get promoted and die while she stubbornly follows a single theory.
There are basically three sections. In the first, Maya works with Dan (Jason Clarke), interrogating prisoners and using torture to obtain the smallest scraps of information. These controversial torture scenes are unflinchingly brutal and their very presence stains the efforts of the Americans through the rest of the film. It seems insane to me that anyone could say that this film glorifies torture or credits it with a role in the death of Bin Laden, especially since the crucial lead comes from a piece of information obtained by a combination of trickery and kindness to a detainee.
The second section follows Maya as she works her theory - involving the importance of a single courier, who she believes represents a direct link to Bin Laden - over years of investigation and toil, climaxing in the efforts to find the man in Pakistan.
The final, often suffocatingly tense section focuses on the preparation and execution of the mission to kill "Geronimo" by a team of Navy SEALS (most notably Chris Pratt and Joel Edgerton, but also fleetingly featuring Scott Adkins and Frank Grillo) , all watched by Maya from a distance.
This structure allows Boal and Bigelow to address a few big themes. America and its place in the world is an explicit subject, but just as important is an urgent critique of the way men see - and more importantly, don't see - women in the workplace, and there are numerous interesting themes and ideas cropping up throughout the film, from the bureaucracy of power and embassy politics to the uncertainty of risk assessment and the personal toll taken by obsession.
Bigelow is brilliant at quickly evoking time and place, and this film beautifully fixes the atmosphere of market squares in Abbatabad and teeming streets in Karachi and Islamabad, while also reeking of the smell of Embassy offices and stakeout vehicles. Boal nicely sketches character in few sequences so that characters like Kyle Chandler's station chief, Edgar Ramirez's Field Team leader and Jennifer Ehle's agent are all vividly rendered without any awkwardly expository scenes. The fine cast is obviously helpful here, and the strength of the work from some sensational actors in tiny parts is a big component in the success of the film, as is the score by Alexandre Desplat, which remains subtle until the action amps up at the climax, when it suddenly recalls John Barry in its stirring urgency, and the typically excellent cinematography by Greig Fraser.
And it is incredibly successful. It manages to be both epic, with dozens of locations and characters spread over the course of a decade, while remaining somehow intimate and pared-down. It is 160 minutes long, but it feels pacy and streamlined, is gripping throughout and manages to rise to highs of emotional impact at crucial junctures. It is never dumb or patronising, yet its ambiguities are provocative and mean that it lingers long in the mind after its haunting final scene. It is always clearly a thriller, yet it echoes films like Zodiac, All the Presidents Men and The Insider in generally avoiding the cliches and tics of that genre, and it works just as well as a drama until it shifts into a different gear and setting for the last reel.
That last half hour delivers on the climax supplied by history, and it is an extraordinary set-piece; grittily textured, precisely paced and utterly intense, it reminds us of what a talented director of action Bigelow has always been.
It is only in the last few years that she has been acknowledged as a great director beyond genre, but Zero Dark Thirty makes that abundantly clear. It is the best type of American cinema - accessible and popular yet ambitious and personal. The best mix of arty and entertaining, really, and something of a masterpiece.
Tuesday, 1 January 2013
ROBIN HOOD
(Ridley Scott, 2010)
While there is an unmistakeable whiff of something very much like contractual obligation about Robin Hood, that does not mean it is without its pleasures. It is that rare beast, a Summer Blockbuster aimed mostly at grown-ups. As such its extremely wordy - the machinations detailed in the opening act in order to set up the plot are nothing if not torturous, as Dukes plot with Kings who betray Barons and double-cross cousins against the backdrop of Anglo-French tension, political infighting and taxation disputes. All this happens while we are still getting to know the principals, Robin Longstride, a Northern Archer campaigning in France with King Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston, tearing lumps of ham off with his bare hands) , and Marion Locksley (Cate Blanchett), an independent war widow who runs the lands owned by her infirm father-in-law (Max Von Sydow). They eventually meet after much complication, and finally Robin learns who he is and what his destiny must be. Strangely, considering its title, this is not really a "Robin Hood" film.
It ends just as Robin and his Merry (more bawdy, in this case) Men become outlaws, pursued by the Sheriff of Nottingham (an underused Matthew MacFadyen) and enemy to King John (Oscar Isaac, terrifically loathsome throughout) and living at one with nature in Sherwood Forest.
Before that it feels almost as if Scott and screenwriter Brian Helgeland had in mind a different story altogether, and decided to link it with the Robin Hood legend just because they could.
The Robin Hood film it most resembles is Robin and Marian, Richard Lester's superb 1976 elegy for youth, love and heroism lost. That comparison does this film no favours, but it does borrow some of the gritty textures and much of the material with Richard Lionheart in France. Bizarrely it yokes all that to a plot centred around the Magna carta, recasting Robin as a more outright freedom fighter than most narratives do, and throwing in a massive battle on a beach for its climax.
Despite being about 45 minutes too long, it just about works. Scott understands this sort of Epic filmmaking, and nobody visualises it quite like him - this is a film full of casually beautiful shots and sequences, and cinematographer John Mathieson does some staggering work. There are battles and banquets, hissable villains aplenty and dashing heroism, and an incredibly classy cast in even the smallest roles, from Mark Strong as the main villain to William Hurt as a sympathetic court advisor.
But this sort of thing really rests upon the leads; and Crowe and Blanchett make an extremely convincing and likeable couple. Crowe can do this sort of macho hero role in his sleep, and though his accent is all over the British Isles, he is one of the only movie stars we have who has true star quality and actual acting ability, and he combines them here. He and Blanchett - that rarity, a leading lady around his age - have significant chemistry, and she is just as powerful and commanding as he is.
Even when all the mayhem around them is clattering awkwardly along, an obviously impersonal corporate product and something of a mess from a director capable of so much more, the leads keep the focus intimate and real, and the film benefits massively from that.
While there is an unmistakeable whiff of something very much like contractual obligation about Robin Hood, that does not mean it is without its pleasures. It is that rare beast, a Summer Blockbuster aimed mostly at grown-ups. As such its extremely wordy - the machinations detailed in the opening act in order to set up the plot are nothing if not torturous, as Dukes plot with Kings who betray Barons and double-cross cousins against the backdrop of Anglo-French tension, political infighting and taxation disputes. All this happens while we are still getting to know the principals, Robin Longstride, a Northern Archer campaigning in France with King Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston, tearing lumps of ham off with his bare hands) , and Marion Locksley (Cate Blanchett), an independent war widow who runs the lands owned by her infirm father-in-law (Max Von Sydow). They eventually meet after much complication, and finally Robin learns who he is and what his destiny must be. Strangely, considering its title, this is not really a "Robin Hood" film.
It ends just as Robin and his Merry (more bawdy, in this case) Men become outlaws, pursued by the Sheriff of Nottingham (an underused Matthew MacFadyen) and enemy to King John (Oscar Isaac, terrifically loathsome throughout) and living at one with nature in Sherwood Forest.
Before that it feels almost as if Scott and screenwriter Brian Helgeland had in mind a different story altogether, and decided to link it with the Robin Hood legend just because they could.
The Robin Hood film it most resembles is Robin and Marian, Richard Lester's superb 1976 elegy for youth, love and heroism lost. That comparison does this film no favours, but it does borrow some of the gritty textures and much of the material with Richard Lionheart in France. Bizarrely it yokes all that to a plot centred around the Magna carta, recasting Robin as a more outright freedom fighter than most narratives do, and throwing in a massive battle on a beach for its climax.
Despite being about 45 minutes too long, it just about works. Scott understands this sort of Epic filmmaking, and nobody visualises it quite like him - this is a film full of casually beautiful shots and sequences, and cinematographer John Mathieson does some staggering work. There are battles and banquets, hissable villains aplenty and dashing heroism, and an incredibly classy cast in even the smallest roles, from Mark Strong as the main villain to William Hurt as a sympathetic court advisor.
But this sort of thing really rests upon the leads; and Crowe and Blanchett make an extremely convincing and likeable couple. Crowe can do this sort of macho hero role in his sleep, and though his accent is all over the British Isles, he is one of the only movie stars we have who has true star quality and actual acting ability, and he combines them here. He and Blanchett - that rarity, a leading lady around his age - have significant chemistry, and she is just as powerful and commanding as he is.
Even when all the mayhem around them is clattering awkwardly along, an obviously impersonal corporate product and something of a mess from a director capable of so much more, the leads keep the focus intimate and real, and the film benefits massively from that.
Saturday, 17 September 2011
TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY
(Tomas Alfredson, 2011)
Beyond the perfection of the costumes - all those tweedy suits, starched shirts and heavy fabric coats - and the beautiful drabness of the production design in general, what effortlessly establishes the atmosphere of London in 1973 in Tomas Alfredson's adaptation of John LeCarre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is the grain. Graininess in the image provides immediate texture and suggests a period setting, while also hinting at the fog these characters operate in, straining to see one another and identify motivations across gloomy, smoke-filled rooms.
This spy game story is quite stunningly directed by Alfredson; thick with mood and a vivid sense of its various places - from chilly, paranoid Cold War Budapest to a seedy Istanbul - and full of memorable images and compositions, this is the work of a director who has a muscular sense of the power of cinema.
Tracing the effort of ousted spymaster George Smiley to find the mole at the top of British Intelligence, the plot is revealed mainly through a long series of hesitant, loaded conversations. Characters speak little but say much, requiring strong work from a dazzling cast of British actors, amongst whom Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch and Mark Strong register most forcibly. Gary Oldman delivers his best work in years, reining in that explosive energy he usually surfs through empty roles upon. Here instead he seems bowed and tired, his quiet routine portrayed in an early montage by Alfredson which tells us all we need to know about this man without a word of dialogue. Indeed, Smiley does not speak forthe first fofteen minutes of the film, and yet we watch him and assess. His power as an actor is translated into the intelligence we can see behind his glasses and the pain one particular betrayal explodes inside him, communicated only in a sort of strained expression and a barely perceptible sagging of the shoulders. He has two scenes which are more obviously spectacular: a long monologue about his single encounter with Karla, the Russian Spymaster who is Smiley's nemesis, and his final encounter with the unmasked mole, wherein he raises his voice - almost shockingly - for the first time.
The set-pieces are few but effortlessly gripping, and the oh-so-English atmosphere of repressed emotion, of strong feelings never exposed, means that the seismic vibrations under the surface of these characters becomes peculiarly moving as the story progresses. This is a tale of ruined people and doomed romantic notions as much as it is of political machination and secret plotting, and it delivers a strong, almost unexpected emotional charge.
That is mainly down to that exceptional cast and Alfredson's direction, greatly assisted by Hoyte van Hoytema's fabulous photography, which is so strong on texture and detail. I came away with certain small images in my head, the sort of detail that makes a world live onscreen: the scratch of a knife buttering toast, the misty shock of Smiley's morning swim in Hampstead, glasses and hair perfectly in place, the drip of a bead of sweat from a waiters brow onto a table-cloth, the glassy light of the US intelligence bulding in stark contrast to the Circuses colourless dullness, and finally; all these alpha male faces in close-up, evaluating, hiding, plotting.
This is the spy thriller as art house drama, but it succeeds in both regards. Stylish, gripping, quietly devastating, it's a stunning piece of cinema.
Beyond the perfection of the costumes - all those tweedy suits, starched shirts and heavy fabric coats - and the beautiful drabness of the production design in general, what effortlessly establishes the atmosphere of London in 1973 in Tomas Alfredson's adaptation of John LeCarre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is the grain. Graininess in the image provides immediate texture and suggests a period setting, while also hinting at the fog these characters operate in, straining to see one another and identify motivations across gloomy, smoke-filled rooms.
This spy game story is quite stunningly directed by Alfredson; thick with mood and a vivid sense of its various places - from chilly, paranoid Cold War Budapest to a seedy Istanbul - and full of memorable images and compositions, this is the work of a director who has a muscular sense of the power of cinema.
Tracing the effort of ousted spymaster George Smiley to find the mole at the top of British Intelligence, the plot is revealed mainly through a long series of hesitant, loaded conversations. Characters speak little but say much, requiring strong work from a dazzling cast of British actors, amongst whom Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch and Mark Strong register most forcibly. Gary Oldman delivers his best work in years, reining in that explosive energy he usually surfs through empty roles upon. Here instead he seems bowed and tired, his quiet routine portrayed in an early montage by Alfredson which tells us all we need to know about this man without a word of dialogue. Indeed, Smiley does not speak forthe first fofteen minutes of the film, and yet we watch him and assess. His power as an actor is translated into the intelligence we can see behind his glasses and the pain one particular betrayal explodes inside him, communicated only in a sort of strained expression and a barely perceptible sagging of the shoulders. He has two scenes which are more obviously spectacular: a long monologue about his single encounter with Karla, the Russian Spymaster who is Smiley's nemesis, and his final encounter with the unmasked mole, wherein he raises his voice - almost shockingly - for the first time.
The set-pieces are few but effortlessly gripping, and the oh-so-English atmosphere of repressed emotion, of strong feelings never exposed, means that the seismic vibrations under the surface of these characters becomes peculiarly moving as the story progresses. This is a tale of ruined people and doomed romantic notions as much as it is of political machination and secret plotting, and it delivers a strong, almost unexpected emotional charge.
That is mainly down to that exceptional cast and Alfredson's direction, greatly assisted by Hoyte van Hoytema's fabulous photography, which is so strong on texture and detail. I came away with certain small images in my head, the sort of detail that makes a world live onscreen: the scratch of a knife buttering toast, the misty shock of Smiley's morning swim in Hampstead, glasses and hair perfectly in place, the drip of a bead of sweat from a waiters brow onto a table-cloth, the glassy light of the US intelligence bulding in stark contrast to the Circuses colourless dullness, and finally; all these alpha male faces in close-up, evaluating, hiding, plotting.
This is the spy thriller as art house drama, but it succeeds in both regards. Stylish, gripping, quietly devastating, it's a stunning piece of cinema.
Tuesday, 21 June 2011
GREEN LANTERN
(Martin Campbell, 2011)
Much as fanboys like to bitch online about movie adaptations not remaining faithful enough to original comic material, some super-hero movies are evidence of just why it's necessary to alter a few details to make a more successful movie. Martin Campbell's big, generic, over-familiar Green Lantern being one. It's extremely faithful to the details of the DC Comics character whose adventures it is based upon. And that's a big part of the problem.
Instead of streamlining the mythology, Green Lantern tries to fit too much in and ends up skimming over the surface of most of the harder sci-fi material, giving the sequences where our hero travels to the base-planet of the
Lantern Corps for a crash course in superheroing no dramatic weight and far less impact than they deserve. This is a Superhero who should carry a degree of awe when he appears. As the film tells us repeatedly, the ring is the most powerful weapon in the universe, capable of creating whatever the bearer can imagine, yet all Hal Jordan can come up with are big guns, giant race tracks, a massive fist and fighter jets. This is symptomatic of the lack of imagination displayed throughout. The scenes where he learns to use the ring play just like the instructional levels from a video game, and the rigorous adherence to a three act structure makes for a more predictable and forgettable narrative than is necessary.
Some scenes appear copied from Superman and Spider-Man, only less effectively delivered, and the central conflict - Jordan's reluctance to become a super-hero because he might not be good enough - makes a bore of our protagonist and wastes much of Ryan Reynolds' easy charm. The climax is perfunctory, even lazy, and characters - Jordan's family, bafflingly introduced in one scene apparently to humanise such a selfish hero, together with a criminally wasted Angela Bassett as a Government Scientist - disappear from the story without explanation.
There are good things. Mark Strong and Peter Sarsgaard are both working in a different, better film, Dion Beebe's photography glows when it's not lost in a CGI murk, and the effects are generally splendid.
But in a world where Super-hero films with the ambition and range of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight and Brad Bird's The Incredibles exist, that's not enough.
Much as fanboys like to bitch online about movie adaptations not remaining faithful enough to original comic material, some super-hero movies are evidence of just why it's necessary to alter a few details to make a more successful movie. Martin Campbell's big, generic, over-familiar Green Lantern being one. It's extremely faithful to the details of the DC Comics character whose adventures it is based upon. And that's a big part of the problem.
Instead of streamlining the mythology, Green Lantern tries to fit too much in and ends up skimming over the surface of most of the harder sci-fi material, giving the sequences where our hero travels to the base-planet of the
Lantern Corps for a crash course in superheroing no dramatic weight and far less impact than they deserve. This is a Superhero who should carry a degree of awe when he appears. As the film tells us repeatedly, the ring is the most powerful weapon in the universe, capable of creating whatever the bearer can imagine, yet all Hal Jordan can come up with are big guns, giant race tracks, a massive fist and fighter jets. This is symptomatic of the lack of imagination displayed throughout. The scenes where he learns to use the ring play just like the instructional levels from a video game, and the rigorous adherence to a three act structure makes for a more predictable and forgettable narrative than is necessary.
Some scenes appear copied from Superman and Spider-Man, only less effectively delivered, and the central conflict - Jordan's reluctance to become a super-hero because he might not be good enough - makes a bore of our protagonist and wastes much of Ryan Reynolds' easy charm. The climax is perfunctory, even lazy, and characters - Jordan's family, bafflingly introduced in one scene apparently to humanise such a selfish hero, together with a criminally wasted Angela Bassett as a Government Scientist - disappear from the story without explanation.
There are good things. Mark Strong and Peter Sarsgaard are both working in a different, better film, Dion Beebe's photography glows when it's not lost in a CGI murk, and the effects are generally splendid.
But in a world where Super-hero films with the ambition and range of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight and Brad Bird's The Incredibles exist, that's not enough.
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