(Chris Rock, 2015)
Chris Rock is pushing himself in some unusual directions as he attempts to fit the talent that makes his stand-up so provocative and fascinating into cinema. So far, it hasn't entirely worked. On stage, using only his ideas, language and expressiveness, he can discuss anything, and flip between topics at will. His talent means an audience will always go with him. Relationships, sex, politics, showbiz, pop culture, everyday banalities, ageing - he can cover them all in a gig. And with Top Five he tries to do something similar.
But cinema - or cinema audiences, at any rate - demand that each narrative fits into a genre. It's how people understand what they're seeing, how they filter and adjust expectations, how they read stories and styles. And so Top Five is a romantic comedy, of sorts. It follows Andre Allen (Rock), a former stand-up turned Hollywood megastar, best known for a series of action comedies where he plays Hammy the Bear in a full bear suit (one of the best gags in the movie is the way everywhere he goes people constantly shout "Yo Hammy!" at him from the background) as he tries to promote his new film, "Uprize", about a Haitian slave revolt. Allen wants to be taken seriously, but the only thing the media are interested in is his forthcoming marriage to a huge reality star (Gabrielle Union). As part of the promotional circus, Allen agrees to having a New York Times journalist follow him around all day. That journalist turns out to be smart, beautiful, challenging Chelsea (Rosario Dawson), and as they get to know one another, Allen is forced to question some of his decisions and attitudes, and so is Chelsea.
That plot allows Rock to take plenty of shots at showbiz ridiculousness, but there are interesting ideas here about fame and the media, addiction and self-deception. If the big influences here seem to be Woody Allen and Albert Brooks, then the scattergun approach Rock chooses means this film is less consistent than their work. Some of the other material is suspect: much of the stuff about relationships is cliched bordering on retrograde, and there is more than a whiff of homophobia to one extended sequence in particular. But Rock's character is funny in a believable way, working himself up into a rant when forced to, and there are some really good gags here. He shared the yuks around too - alongside cameos for Adam Sandler, Whoopi Goldberg, Tracy Morgan, DMX and Jerry Seinfeld, perhaps the best sequence in the movie sees Andre take Chelsea back to his roots, where an impromptu gathering of friends in an apartment is a series of riffs and friendly insults that does more to humanise him than the entire preceding hour.
Rock and Dawson are both good, but their chemistry is better - duelling intelligences, arguing and debating and bonding, all framed against New York in summer, shot gloriously by Manuel Alberto Claro, Lars Von Trier's usual D.P.
So: as a romcom, this works. But it's greater ambitions are what make it really interesting, even if it never quiet fulfils what Rock seems to be aiming for.
Showing posts with label Rosario Dawson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rosario Dawson. Show all posts
Saturday, 9 May 2015
Tuesday, 26 November 2013
10 YEARS
(Jamie Linden, 2012)
Gathering together a genuinely impressive cast for his debut as writer-director, Linden tells a loose, modest, at times extremely charming story in the same vein as The Big Chill and The Return of The Secausus Seven and Beautiful Girls, returning a bunch of old friends to their hometown for a Highschool Reunion a decade on and observing the ensuing emotional revelations and collisions with a gentle, affectionate eye.
In doing so, he goes for broad types, and so we have Chris Pratt, stealing most of the laughs as the ex hellraiser and bully, now somewhat gone to seed as the suburban father of two, Justin Long and Max Minghella as the ex-Geeks still in love with the beauty queen (Lynn Collins), Brian Geraghty bringing his new wife who is shocked to discover that he acted like a black guy throughout Highschool, while most of the emotional ballast is carried by Oscar Isaac as the rock star still in love with the one who got away (Kate Mara) and Channing Tatum, who has not seen his first love (Rosario Dawson) since their traumatic split ten years before.
There are lovely moments here of universal humanity; a few big laughs and a couple of good musical sequences. But Linden always seems more comfortable with the romcom elements; and the film comes most vividly to life during the scenes between the excellent Isaac and Mara. The moment when he sings his big hit single for karaoke at a late night dive bar (which she has never heard) and she realises it is about her is beautifully acted by Mara. The cast are the films real glory, lending it a classy finish which it perhaps does not deserve.
Gathering together a genuinely impressive cast for his debut as writer-director, Linden tells a loose, modest, at times extremely charming story in the same vein as The Big Chill and The Return of The Secausus Seven and Beautiful Girls, returning a bunch of old friends to their hometown for a Highschool Reunion a decade on and observing the ensuing emotional revelations and collisions with a gentle, affectionate eye.
In doing so, he goes for broad types, and so we have Chris Pratt, stealing most of the laughs as the ex hellraiser and bully, now somewhat gone to seed as the suburban father of two, Justin Long and Max Minghella as the ex-Geeks still in love with the beauty queen (Lynn Collins), Brian Geraghty bringing his new wife who is shocked to discover that he acted like a black guy throughout Highschool, while most of the emotional ballast is carried by Oscar Isaac as the rock star still in love with the one who got away (Kate Mara) and Channing Tatum, who has not seen his first love (Rosario Dawson) since their traumatic split ten years before.
There are lovely moments here of universal humanity; a few big laughs and a couple of good musical sequences. But Linden always seems more comfortable with the romcom elements; and the film comes most vividly to life during the scenes between the excellent Isaac and Mara. The moment when he sings his big hit single for karaoke at a late night dive bar (which she has never heard) and she realises it is about her is beautifully acted by Mara. The cast are the films real glory, lending it a classy finish which it perhaps does not deserve.
Monday, 8 April 2013
TRANCE
(Danny Boyle, 2013)
Some directors foreground their own style to what can be a distracting extent. Some do it for a reason, some are capable of expressing a thematic point through the stylistic devices they favour (though that is true of a depressingly small number), and some just like to keep a film visually and rhythmically interesting.
Danny Boyle, say, announced himself after a lengthy apprenticeship in British television, and his 1994 debut Shallow Grave bears some evidence of that experience. It is interior, carefully composed, sensitive to the pulses and gradations of its characters experiences. At the same time, it is obviously the work of a director bursting with exitement at the possibilities of the cinematic medium. That excitement bubbled over in his breakthrough smash, Trainspotting, from the next year. That film is full of tricks and devices, and feels like it was made by somebody who loved Scorsese's Goodfellas, pilfering many of the techniques on show in that film and using them to varying effect.
Since then, Boyle has gone back and forth. Sometimes extremely ostentatious in his directorial choices to the extent that he resembles Oliver Stone (minus the pompous politicising) at his worst - Slumdog Millionaire, for instance, or 127 Hours are both irritating for the barrage of film stocks, the hyperactivity of the editing, the use of music reminiscent of advertisements and trailers - he can also simplify his style given the right material. The dogma-esque horror of 28 Days Later and quiet comedy of Millions show a filmmaker suppressing his own ego for the good of his story. The former, along with another collaboration with writer Alex Garland, the sci-fi Sunshine, suggest that Boyle is best in the bold stories of genre territory where his style can serve and decorate narrative rather than defacing it, as is too often the case in drama.
Trance, therefore, should be a good fit for him. A heist thriller, it follows Auction-house employee Simon (James McAvoy) after a £27 million painting is stolen from his workplace by gangster Franck (Vincent Cassel) and his mob. Simon, struggling with massive gambling debts, was in on the theft, but an injury during the incident leaves him with partial amnesia, and the painting is missing. Desperate to recover it, Franck engages hypno-therapist Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson) to help Simon extract the information from his own mind. But Elizabeth seems to be working her own agenda, and Simon's memories are more complex than they at first appear...
For much of the first hour or so, Trance is a perfectly middling Brit-thriller with some dark humour and stylish photography. The characters are familiar and not too interesting or sympathetic, and the script is a little tin-eared and obvious. The three charismatic leads keep it watchable despite this. And then it delves into psychology and the twists begin. Boyle's direction and editing get hallucinatory, dream-sequences seep into reality and the revelations start to rip into the story.
The final one of these is a bit of a rug-pull, and I can imagine some viewers will feel cheated by what it does to the story and the dynamic of the relationships between our central trio. But since I didn't care remotely about any of these characters - all movie-people, with little authentic or true about them - I enjoyed the last act more than the rest of the film. It flies along, adds some recognisably human behaviour to the relationship between two of the characters (up until then every exchange has felt like the kind of thing that only happens in movies) and for once, the rippling of fantasy, flashback and trance-states flicking through the story more or less excuses Boyle his stylistic tics. Here, those include heavy use of filters and distorted lenses together with the usual disoriented editing and a few nightmarish effects shots.
The repositioning of sympathy triggered by the last revelation, in particular, is probably the most interesting thing about the film. Of the leads, Dawson has the most interesting material, McEvoy is a watchable presence but a little shallow, and Cassel does a variation on roles he has played before, all of which suggest the problem of the first couple of acts. The film they constitute is mildly fun but also somewhat rote, set in a London without much sense of place (surprising from Boyle, who is usually very good in this regard) and centred on characters without much depth to them.
That it needs such severe narrative whiplash to become vaguely interesting, then, can be seen as a criticism of Trance, but it is also the thing that makes it worthwhile.
Some directors foreground their own style to what can be a distracting extent. Some do it for a reason, some are capable of expressing a thematic point through the stylistic devices they favour (though that is true of a depressingly small number), and some just like to keep a film visually and rhythmically interesting.
Danny Boyle, say, announced himself after a lengthy apprenticeship in British television, and his 1994 debut Shallow Grave bears some evidence of that experience. It is interior, carefully composed, sensitive to the pulses and gradations of its characters experiences. At the same time, it is obviously the work of a director bursting with exitement at the possibilities of the cinematic medium. That excitement bubbled over in his breakthrough smash, Trainspotting, from the next year. That film is full of tricks and devices, and feels like it was made by somebody who loved Scorsese's Goodfellas, pilfering many of the techniques on show in that film and using them to varying effect.
Since then, Boyle has gone back and forth. Sometimes extremely ostentatious in his directorial choices to the extent that he resembles Oliver Stone (minus the pompous politicising) at his worst - Slumdog Millionaire, for instance, or 127 Hours are both irritating for the barrage of film stocks, the hyperactivity of the editing, the use of music reminiscent of advertisements and trailers - he can also simplify his style given the right material. The dogma-esque horror of 28 Days Later and quiet comedy of Millions show a filmmaker suppressing his own ego for the good of his story. The former, along with another collaboration with writer Alex Garland, the sci-fi Sunshine, suggest that Boyle is best in the bold stories of genre territory where his style can serve and decorate narrative rather than defacing it, as is too often the case in drama.
Trance, therefore, should be a good fit for him. A heist thriller, it follows Auction-house employee Simon (James McAvoy) after a £27 million painting is stolen from his workplace by gangster Franck (Vincent Cassel) and his mob. Simon, struggling with massive gambling debts, was in on the theft, but an injury during the incident leaves him with partial amnesia, and the painting is missing. Desperate to recover it, Franck engages hypno-therapist Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson) to help Simon extract the information from his own mind. But Elizabeth seems to be working her own agenda, and Simon's memories are more complex than they at first appear...
For much of the first hour or so, Trance is a perfectly middling Brit-thriller with some dark humour and stylish photography. The characters are familiar and not too interesting or sympathetic, and the script is a little tin-eared and obvious. The three charismatic leads keep it watchable despite this. And then it delves into psychology and the twists begin. Boyle's direction and editing get hallucinatory, dream-sequences seep into reality and the revelations start to rip into the story.
The final one of these is a bit of a rug-pull, and I can imagine some viewers will feel cheated by what it does to the story and the dynamic of the relationships between our central trio. But since I didn't care remotely about any of these characters - all movie-people, with little authentic or true about them - I enjoyed the last act more than the rest of the film. It flies along, adds some recognisably human behaviour to the relationship between two of the characters (up until then every exchange has felt like the kind of thing that only happens in movies) and for once, the rippling of fantasy, flashback and trance-states flicking through the story more or less excuses Boyle his stylistic tics. Here, those include heavy use of filters and distorted lenses together with the usual disoriented editing and a few nightmarish effects shots.
The repositioning of sympathy triggered by the last revelation, in particular, is probably the most interesting thing about the film. Of the leads, Dawson has the most interesting material, McEvoy is a watchable presence but a little shallow, and Cassel does a variation on roles he has played before, all of which suggest the problem of the first couple of acts. The film they constitute is mildly fun but also somewhat rote, set in a London without much sense of place (surprising from Boyle, who is usually very good in this regard) and centred on characters without much depth to them.
That it needs such severe narrative whiplash to become vaguely interesting, then, can be seen as a criticism of Trance, but it is also the thing that makes it worthwhile.
Tuesday, 3 April 2012
UNSTOPPABLE
(Tony Scott, 2010)
Unstoppable is probably Tony Scott's worst film since the risable The Fan, and yet, almost all of what is good about it is down to him.
Based on an actual incident, the film follows the efforts of various railroad workers to halt a driverless, runaway train before it reaches a large population centre where the chemicals amongst it's cargo are likely to cause a deadly accident. Chief amongst those workers are a predictably mismatched pair in the cab of another train on the same line, each with his own, not-all-that-interesting backstory (Denzel Washington and Chris Pine).
The acting is efficient enough, both leads displaying their different brands of starry charisma, but this is thin stuff, using characters as muscles to move the plot jerkily along, giving them the barest possible personality types, and massively over-reliant on tv news for exposition.
What makes it worthwhile is Scott's direction. He takes material which demands extremely repetitive imagery - trains, trains and more trains - and with his usual aggressive editing, he fills the frame with these powerful machines hurtling across beautifully desolate industrial landscapes, all rattling freight carriages and roaring engines. The people - and the story, even - seem almost irrelevant as he layers and builds his shots up into thrilling montages of locomotives crossing the earth, the sense of peril surrounding them never quite as arresting as it might be.
Unstoppable is probably Tony Scott's worst film since the risable The Fan, and yet, almost all of what is good about it is down to him.
Based on an actual incident, the film follows the efforts of various railroad workers to halt a driverless, runaway train before it reaches a large population centre where the chemicals amongst it's cargo are likely to cause a deadly accident. Chief amongst those workers are a predictably mismatched pair in the cab of another train on the same line, each with his own, not-all-that-interesting backstory (Denzel Washington and Chris Pine).
The acting is efficient enough, both leads displaying their different brands of starry charisma, but this is thin stuff, using characters as muscles to move the plot jerkily along, giving them the barest possible personality types, and massively over-reliant on tv news for exposition.
What makes it worthwhile is Scott's direction. He takes material which demands extremely repetitive imagery - trains, trains and more trains - and with his usual aggressive editing, he fills the frame with these powerful machines hurtling across beautifully desolate industrial landscapes, all rattling freight carriages and roaring engines. The people - and the story, even - seem almost irrelevant as he layers and builds his shots up into thrilling montages of locomotives crossing the earth, the sense of peril surrounding them never quite as arresting as it might be.
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