(Adam McKay, 2015)
It starts out all Goodfellas-by-way-of-amped-up-1990s-Oliver Stone; rapid changes in film stock, music pumping, loads of voiceover, exposition but delivered with wit and gags and style; angry and exhilarated and loud and energetic.
Thats lasts about 15-20 minutes, and then The Big Short settles into what it actually is: a sort of real life financial heist story. Oh, every so often McKay throws in a little splash of post-modernism - here's Selena Gomez or Margot Robbie or Anthony Bourdain, as themselves, explaining some complex financial concept in layman's terms, here's Ryan Gosling's narrator figure addressing the camera - but mainly it stays on the straight and narrow, and just tells its story.
Luckily that story is inherently interesting. How the global financial crash came about is just one more story beat here; and when Steve Carrell's Mark Baum realises what is about to happen and is sent reeling away from a restaurant, stunned by the knowledge, The Big Short reaches a nice pitch of hysterical black comedy and sober despair at what was allowed to happen. His character has his own Fund, and he and his team bet wildly against the housing market at the behest of Gosling's slick trader Jared Vennett. They have been beaten to the punch by oddball genius hedge fund manager Michael Burry (Christian Bale), who defies all his clients and incurs at least one lawsuit by doing the same thing a year or so earlier. Then there are the two small town traders who happen across this deal and, aided by their ex-Wall Street Hotshot neighbour Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt) buy into the same game.
From then on, its just a waiting game, and McKay conjures impressive tension, considering the fact that we all know what eventually happens.
In the interim McKay shows his characters shock at just how rigged and corrupt the banking industry in the USA was back then, but always keeps the actions and locations varied - Wall Street is prominent, but his characters visit Miami condos, Vegas casinos, Devon Pubs and lap-dancing clubs along the way. Even if the humour is pitch black, he drops the odd bombshell of realism to shock the audience: Pitt chiding his young proteges by recounting the human cost of what will happen being perhaps the highlight.
The starry cast makes it all that much more painless. Gosling can play smug and slick in his sleep, Carrell makes Baum's emotional implosion not only queasy but touching, Pitt is convincingly eccentric, and Bale steals the film with his surges of energy (soundtracked to heavy metal drumming) and inability to socially connect.
McKay keeps it busy and colourful, and ends on a nice note of triumph for his heroes, but defeat for his country, which is probably as it should be, with this story.
Showing posts with label Ryan Gosling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ryan Gosling. Show all posts
Thursday, 7 January 2016
Tuesday, 6 August 2013
ONLY GOD FORGIVES
(Nicolas Winding Refn, 2013)
Basking in the success of Drive, Winding Refn and his star and muse Ryan Gosling indulge themselves mightily with this confounding, terrible, fascinating follow-up.
Winding Refn has indulged himself after success before, crafting the difficult, divisive Fear X to more or less scuttle his initial career momentum. Only God Forgives is more commercial than that odd, quiet little film, but it often feels deliberately antagonistic in its studied artiness, obscurity and gruelling ultra-violence.
Gosling, purportedly the lead, is really a supporting character here. He plays Julian, an American in Bangkok who runs a Thai boxing gym and a drug-dealing operation with his older brother Billy (Tom Burke, magnetic in his few scenes). When Billy is killed in revenge for his own rape and murder of a 16 year old girl, their dragon of a mother Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas, gloriously playing against type) flies in and puts out a contract on Lt Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), the Detective who arranged Billy's death. Chang emerges as the film's true protagonist, facing off against Julian and Crystal in the last act as Winding Refn devotes much screentime to following him as he practices with his sword, sings karaoke, and chats with his young daughter.
That story sounds quite simple and straightforward. But Winding Refn's treatment of it is anything but. He dedicates the film to Alejandro Jodorowsky, but there is much David Lynch too in the dream-logic which seems to govern much of the narrative here. Scenes are slowed down to a glacial crawl, all the better to appreciate the two richest, most enjoyable aspects of the production: the excellent, inventive score by Cliff Martinez and the superb cinematography by Larry Smith. That photography really is beautiful; almost every shot here could be printed off and hung from a wall. Refn and Smith create tableau and linger upon them with slow zooms and repeated cuts. Playing with filters - much of the action is bathed in red - and patterns of light, almost the entirety of the film is set in nocturnal Bangkok. This suggests Wong Kar Wai's treatment of Hong Kong as a neon city of nighttime energy and hidden lives only without any of the sense of verisimilitude in his work; Only God Forgives never remotely feels set in any sort of "real" world. Instead we have a mix of gaudy nightmare and a twisted version of the pulp-fairytale world seen in Drive. The Winding Refn film it most resembles, however, is Valhalla Rising, his delirious Viking head trip from 2009. There, the arty playing with perception and dalliance with slow cinema techniques suited the world and the themes - here they only serve to show up the hollowness of both. Here they seem silly.
Worse, the pacing and endless intense focus upon production design is utterly tedious - obscure scenes feel endless. That these longeurs are interrupted generally by scenes of awful violence - hands lopped off, brains beaten in, faces pulped, UZI massacres - feels exploitative and adolescent in it's glee.
Gosling, for his part, does little, expressing no emotion: a near-mute, passive pretty face throughout a film which is, for all its lush beauty, variously dull and offensively terrible.
Basking in the success of Drive, Winding Refn and his star and muse Ryan Gosling indulge themselves mightily with this confounding, terrible, fascinating follow-up.
Winding Refn has indulged himself after success before, crafting the difficult, divisive Fear X to more or less scuttle his initial career momentum. Only God Forgives is more commercial than that odd, quiet little film, but it often feels deliberately antagonistic in its studied artiness, obscurity and gruelling ultra-violence.
Gosling, purportedly the lead, is really a supporting character here. He plays Julian, an American in Bangkok who runs a Thai boxing gym and a drug-dealing operation with his older brother Billy (Tom Burke, magnetic in his few scenes). When Billy is killed in revenge for his own rape and murder of a 16 year old girl, their dragon of a mother Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas, gloriously playing against type) flies in and puts out a contract on Lt Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), the Detective who arranged Billy's death. Chang emerges as the film's true protagonist, facing off against Julian and Crystal in the last act as Winding Refn devotes much screentime to following him as he practices with his sword, sings karaoke, and chats with his young daughter.
That story sounds quite simple and straightforward. But Winding Refn's treatment of it is anything but. He dedicates the film to Alejandro Jodorowsky, but there is much David Lynch too in the dream-logic which seems to govern much of the narrative here. Scenes are slowed down to a glacial crawl, all the better to appreciate the two richest, most enjoyable aspects of the production: the excellent, inventive score by Cliff Martinez and the superb cinematography by Larry Smith. That photography really is beautiful; almost every shot here could be printed off and hung from a wall. Refn and Smith create tableau and linger upon them with slow zooms and repeated cuts. Playing with filters - much of the action is bathed in red - and patterns of light, almost the entirety of the film is set in nocturnal Bangkok. This suggests Wong Kar Wai's treatment of Hong Kong as a neon city of nighttime energy and hidden lives only without any of the sense of verisimilitude in his work; Only God Forgives never remotely feels set in any sort of "real" world. Instead we have a mix of gaudy nightmare and a twisted version of the pulp-fairytale world seen in Drive. The Winding Refn film it most resembles, however, is Valhalla Rising, his delirious Viking head trip from 2009. There, the arty playing with perception and dalliance with slow cinema techniques suited the world and the themes - here they only serve to show up the hollowness of both. Here they seem silly.
Worse, the pacing and endless intense focus upon production design is utterly tedious - obscure scenes feel endless. That these longeurs are interrupted generally by scenes of awful violence - hands lopped off, brains beaten in, faces pulped, UZI massacres - feels exploitative and adolescent in it's glee.
Gosling, for his part, does little, expressing no emotion: a near-mute, passive pretty face throughout a film which is, for all its lush beauty, variously dull and offensively terrible.
Monday, 22 April 2013
THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES
(Derek Cianfrance, 2012)
Long, slow, sombre and oh-so serious, Cianfrance's film is the sort of old-fashioned grand American filmmaking many assume no longer exists. It is also immensely flawed, though the strength of its directors bold style and commanding technique obscures this to a large extent.
A mightily ambitious family saga with touches of melodrama and crime in its DNA, it begins with Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), a stunt motorbike rider at a travelling carnival who is approached upon his return to an upstate New York town by a local girl with whom he once had a fling. Romena (Eva Mendes) had his baby, and once she lets him know, his wandering days end, and he sticks around, falling in with Ben Mendelsohn's scuzzy mechanic and causing trouble for just about everyone. That trouble eventually crosses the line into outright criminality, and the consequences of his actions effect local cop Avery (Bradley Cooper), who is struggling with the corruption around him and his own issues with his father and wife (Rose Byrne). The connection between these two men is echoed years later when their sons meet by chance.
The kind of ambition Cianfrance shows here is a gamble. While it may be impressive in its own right - not many young directors have such reach or even understand how to conjure up the sort of intensity The Place Beyond The Pines frequently manages - it demands an exceptional level of talent to deliver an end product worthy of it's loftier goals.
Cianfrance is undoubtedly a talent. He has a fine eye and infuses scenes with an arty sense of personality, a coherent and distinctly individual view of the world which gives his film a haunted, emotional quality which makes it seem more interesting than it actually is. The problem then is that his central thesis here - the evil that men do, basically - is such a watery one that it renders his film little more than a torrid, extremely male melodrama. It plays not unlike the work of James Gray, only lacking his sense of intelligence and some of the complexity his work evinces.
It has a strong ensemble, but a couple of the actors are lazily cast. Gosling, for instance, plays Gosling, more avatar than character, all wardrobe choices (inside-out t-shirts), constant cigarette and pout. He poses better than any other actor currently alive, and does a sort of method angst, but he is superficial here, at best. Then there is Ray Liotta, here playing a corrupt, strangely menacing Cop, whose nature we understand almost as soon as we see his face.
Faring best is Bradley Cooper in a tricky role. His cocksure smirk is wiped away by the plot here, and the sweaty anxiety which replaces it makes of him a far more compelling figure.
What we are left with, then, is a good tale, quite well told. If only it hadn't presented itself as so much more.
Long, slow, sombre and oh-so serious, Cianfrance's film is the sort of old-fashioned grand American filmmaking many assume no longer exists. It is also immensely flawed, though the strength of its directors bold style and commanding technique obscures this to a large extent.
A mightily ambitious family saga with touches of melodrama and crime in its DNA, it begins with Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), a stunt motorbike rider at a travelling carnival who is approached upon his return to an upstate New York town by a local girl with whom he once had a fling. Romena (Eva Mendes) had his baby, and once she lets him know, his wandering days end, and he sticks around, falling in with Ben Mendelsohn's scuzzy mechanic and causing trouble for just about everyone. That trouble eventually crosses the line into outright criminality, and the consequences of his actions effect local cop Avery (Bradley Cooper), who is struggling with the corruption around him and his own issues with his father and wife (Rose Byrne). The connection between these two men is echoed years later when their sons meet by chance.
The kind of ambition Cianfrance shows here is a gamble. While it may be impressive in its own right - not many young directors have such reach or even understand how to conjure up the sort of intensity The Place Beyond The Pines frequently manages - it demands an exceptional level of talent to deliver an end product worthy of it's loftier goals.
Cianfrance is undoubtedly a talent. He has a fine eye and infuses scenes with an arty sense of personality, a coherent and distinctly individual view of the world which gives his film a haunted, emotional quality which makes it seem more interesting than it actually is. The problem then is that his central thesis here - the evil that men do, basically - is such a watery one that it renders his film little more than a torrid, extremely male melodrama. It plays not unlike the work of James Gray, only lacking his sense of intelligence and some of the complexity his work evinces.
It has a strong ensemble, but a couple of the actors are lazily cast. Gosling, for instance, plays Gosling, more avatar than character, all wardrobe choices (inside-out t-shirts), constant cigarette and pout. He poses better than any other actor currently alive, and does a sort of method angst, but he is superficial here, at best. Then there is Ray Liotta, here playing a corrupt, strangely menacing Cop, whose nature we understand almost as soon as we see his face.
Faring best is Bradley Cooper in a tricky role. His cocksure smirk is wiped away by the plot here, and the sweaty anxiety which replaces it makes of him a far more compelling figure.
What we are left with, then, is a good tale, quite well told. If only it hadn't presented itself as so much more.
Thursday, 17 January 2013
GANGSTER SQUAD
(Ruben Fleischer, 2013)
Gangster Squad plays like somebody saw The Untouchables and L.A. Confidential and thought: I can do that.
Only they couldn't.
Instead what they made was a dumbed-down, simplified version of similar material. This is James Ellroy for the Playstation generation; what it takes from Ellroy and classic gangster pictures are the superficial things - the hats, the suits, the cars, the art deco architecture, the tommy guns. What it misses out is what makes Ellroy so good and so distinctive - the vicious characterisation, the sprawling narratives, the gaudy peppering of sex and violence, the intensity, the wit.
This is a film that manages to do everything it does badly. A massive climactic tommy gun battle is tedious and predictable. The romance between Ryan Gosling's charming detective and Emma Stone's moll is dull and somewhat perfunctory. Ganglord Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn, channelling a villain from Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy) intimidating then having inept underlings murdered in creative ways is second-hand and cliched. The scene where Josh Brolin's heroic cop O'Meara rounds up his squad is laughably silly, as is his voiceover narration ("Evil can only thrive when good men do nothing") while his relationship with his pregnant wife is copied more or less verbatim from The Untouchables but lacks the sincerity and charm of the equivalent scenes in that film.
The story follows the establishment of an off-the-books squad of Los Angeles cops in 1949, brought together in order to wage covert war against the massively powerful and ruthless mobster Cohen.
In reality the story lurches along from one middling action scene to the next, doling out cardboard character beats in between. It all looks very slick and pretty; too much so. These cops are immaculately tailored, their cars gleaming, hair beautifully coiffed. Every twist and turn is telegraphed, and Fleischer mainly seems to be showcasing his own ability to handle a big property like this one perhaps in the hopes of landing a big studio blockbuster as his next movie.
The real shame of it is the immense waste of that cast, filled with great faces and huge talent as it is. Only Penn really registers. Brolin is boring, Gosling seems to be parodying himself, and nobody else has enough of a character to really play. Instead they just concentrate on looking good and advancing the plot, much like the film itself.
Gangster Squad plays like somebody saw The Untouchables and L.A. Confidential and thought: I can do that.
Only they couldn't.
Instead what they made was a dumbed-down, simplified version of similar material. This is James Ellroy for the Playstation generation; what it takes from Ellroy and classic gangster pictures are the superficial things - the hats, the suits, the cars, the art deco architecture, the tommy guns. What it misses out is what makes Ellroy so good and so distinctive - the vicious characterisation, the sprawling narratives, the gaudy peppering of sex and violence, the intensity, the wit.
This is a film that manages to do everything it does badly. A massive climactic tommy gun battle is tedious and predictable. The romance between Ryan Gosling's charming detective and Emma Stone's moll is dull and somewhat perfunctory. Ganglord Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn, channelling a villain from Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy) intimidating then having inept underlings murdered in creative ways is second-hand and cliched. The scene where Josh Brolin's heroic cop O'Meara rounds up his squad is laughably silly, as is his voiceover narration ("Evil can only thrive when good men do nothing") while his relationship with his pregnant wife is copied more or less verbatim from The Untouchables but lacks the sincerity and charm of the equivalent scenes in that film.
The story follows the establishment of an off-the-books squad of Los Angeles cops in 1949, brought together in order to wage covert war against the massively powerful and ruthless mobster Cohen.
In reality the story lurches along from one middling action scene to the next, doling out cardboard character beats in between. It all looks very slick and pretty; too much so. These cops are immaculately tailored, their cars gleaming, hair beautifully coiffed. Every twist and turn is telegraphed, and Fleischer mainly seems to be showcasing his own ability to handle a big property like this one perhaps in the hopes of landing a big studio blockbuster as his next movie.
The real shame of it is the immense waste of that cast, filled with great faces and huge talent as it is. Only Penn really registers. Brolin is boring, Gosling seems to be parodying himself, and nobody else has enough of a character to really play. Instead they just concentrate on looking good and advancing the plot, much like the film itself.
Sunday, 6 November 2011
THE IDES OF MARCH
(George Clooney, 2011)
Clooney follows his sober, earnest, meaningful work on Good Night and Good Luck with another sober, earnest, meaningful drama about politics and the media, only this time his conclusions are darker and more despairing, his style a little blander and less distinctive.
His film centres upon young campaign Organiser Stephen (Ryan Gosling), involved in campaigning for a charismatic, free-thinking Governor, played by Clooney himself, to receive the Democratic Presidential nomination. Stephen starts off idealistic and passionate, and this story basically traces through his political coming-of-age as he grows more and more disillusioned. In this regard, Gosling is fine casting, convincing as the starry-eyed young hotshot politico and skilfully suggesting the pain of his rude awakening, the slight smugness of his screen presence a good fit for the character.
It's a film filled with people in suits having intense conversations in dull, realist locations and makes plain Clooney's admiration for the smart, adult political films of the 1950s and '60s and the influence of a director like Sidney Lumet on his work. Here the direction is absolutely at the service of the script, giving it all a confined, intimate feel which is true to the theatrical roots of the piece (its an adaptation of the play "Farragut North" by screenwriter Beau Willimon), and placing the onus squarely on the actors and the words they say. The actors are uniformly strong; Clooney suggesting the complexity and compromise of even the most shining public figure, Evan Rachel Wood transforming what could have been a mere plot device into a character I doubt was on the page, and Max Minghella, Marisa Tomei and Jennifer Ehle all strong in smaller parts. Two supporting actor stalwarts predictably steal the film, however; Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti play rival Campaign managers, their visceral dislike obvious in an early scene, and each is magnetic and believable throughout. Hoffman's lack of vanity is as ever a strength, his belly hanging over his belt as he rants about loyalty and betrayal. Giamatti is more reptilian, proud of his endgame even as he laments his own cynicism.
Cynicism is the key feeling here. Politics is incredibly cynical, this film tells us. It is full of cynical people and it makes even the innocent cynical, if it doesn't destroy them. This cynicism is necessary, it's the only way to win, to make a difference. This slightly simple-minded thesis is perhaps the film's greatest flaw, alongside the scripts tendency to indulge in speechifying. Characters seem to line up to make long speeches at one another, many of them fine pieces of writing, but lacking the crackle of the back and forth dialogue exchange which dominates the film.
Add to that the sense that its all a little over-familiar, a little too easy, and a little middle-of- the-road, and Clooney's achievement in fashioning such a solid piece of grown-up entertainment seems lessened a little bit. But only a little. This is a serious, well-made film with something to say, and it's full of good acting and fine scenes, which in the modern climate of American cinema, is no small thing.
Clooney follows his sober, earnest, meaningful work on Good Night and Good Luck with another sober, earnest, meaningful drama about politics and the media, only this time his conclusions are darker and more despairing, his style a little blander and less distinctive.
His film centres upon young campaign Organiser Stephen (Ryan Gosling), involved in campaigning for a charismatic, free-thinking Governor, played by Clooney himself, to receive the Democratic Presidential nomination. Stephen starts off idealistic and passionate, and this story basically traces through his political coming-of-age as he grows more and more disillusioned. In this regard, Gosling is fine casting, convincing as the starry-eyed young hotshot politico and skilfully suggesting the pain of his rude awakening, the slight smugness of his screen presence a good fit for the character.
It's a film filled with people in suits having intense conversations in dull, realist locations and makes plain Clooney's admiration for the smart, adult political films of the 1950s and '60s and the influence of a director like Sidney Lumet on his work. Here the direction is absolutely at the service of the script, giving it all a confined, intimate feel which is true to the theatrical roots of the piece (its an adaptation of the play "Farragut North" by screenwriter Beau Willimon), and placing the onus squarely on the actors and the words they say. The actors are uniformly strong; Clooney suggesting the complexity and compromise of even the most shining public figure, Evan Rachel Wood transforming what could have been a mere plot device into a character I doubt was on the page, and Max Minghella, Marisa Tomei and Jennifer Ehle all strong in smaller parts. Two supporting actor stalwarts predictably steal the film, however; Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti play rival Campaign managers, their visceral dislike obvious in an early scene, and each is magnetic and believable throughout. Hoffman's lack of vanity is as ever a strength, his belly hanging over his belt as he rants about loyalty and betrayal. Giamatti is more reptilian, proud of his endgame even as he laments his own cynicism.
Cynicism is the key feeling here. Politics is incredibly cynical, this film tells us. It is full of cynical people and it makes even the innocent cynical, if it doesn't destroy them. This cynicism is necessary, it's the only way to win, to make a difference. This slightly simple-minded thesis is perhaps the film's greatest flaw, alongside the scripts tendency to indulge in speechifying. Characters seem to line up to make long speeches at one another, many of them fine pieces of writing, but lacking the crackle of the back and forth dialogue exchange which dominates the film.
Add to that the sense that its all a little over-familiar, a little too easy, and a little middle-of- the-road, and Clooney's achievement in fashioning such a solid piece of grown-up entertainment seems lessened a little bit. But only a little. This is a serious, well-made film with something to say, and it's full of good acting and fine scenes, which in the modern climate of American cinema, is no small thing.
Thursday, 27 October 2011
CRAZY STUPID LOVE
(Glen Ficara & John Requa, 2011)
Playing By Heart is a 1998 comedy drama, directed by one Willard Carroll, with a surprisingly starry cast. Sean Connery, Angelina Jolie, Ryan Phillippe,, Jon Stewart, Dennis Quaid, Madeilne Stowe and Gena Rowlands are all part of the impressive ensemble. It's blandly shot, set to an eclectic soundtrack of pop songs, and set in the most middle class, glossily attractive parts of Los Angeles. It's a portrayal of a disparate group of characters in the city and their relationships and struggles with love. Its like a less ambitious, less accomplished, less interesting spin on superior multi-character LA dramas like Robert Altman's Short Cuts, Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia or Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon. Those films all grapple with multiple themes and deeper trends, with knotty social and emotional problems, and ultimately with life itself. Not Playing By Heart. It's about love, nothing more, nothing less. And that's ok. Love is a worthy and profound subject, and has inspired thousands of great works of art, from pop songs to poetry to novels to cinema. I'm just not sure that the romantic comedy is the genre best suited to discussing it. Well, perhaps the auteur-driven romantic comedy. Creative intelligences like that Woody Allen or Albert Brooks have done it with conspicuous success in the past. But the slick romcom, all effortlessly nice fashion, unconvincingly spacious homes, identity-less, boring music and predictably conventional storytelling? That sort of risk free, lazy film is all about love. But the form seems to prevent any sort of deeper consideration of the subject as a theme. The superficial and narrative elements never go far enough. Love is strange, but worthwhile, is the greeting card conclusion many such films seem to settle upon.
Crazy Stupid Love even includes the word in its title, and its characters openly discuss love as an intangible and an ideal on a couple of occasions. It centres around an interlinked - of course - collection of people in LA. Steve Carell plays a fortysomething whose wife, played with customary class and rawness by Julianne Moore, asks him for a divorce on a date one night. Sent reeling back clueless onto the singles scene he meets a dapper young stud, played by the effortlessly smug Ryan Gosling, who instructs him how to dress, talk and pick up women, before he himself falls in love. Meanwhile Carell's 13 year-old son is in love with his 17 year-old babysitter, who loves Carell and the links and contrivances go on.
There are moments of truth and some laughs in a script which sporadically pops with wisdom on the reality of marriage, for instance, or the cruelty of singledom. The attractive cast makes much of it work much better than it should; Carell's sincerity is nicely-deployed, and contrasts well with Gosling's preening self-regard.
Ultimately, however, it all climaxes in a series of farcical confrontations and public declarations; the kind of thing, in short, that happens exclusively in romcoms. It may provide narrative satisfaction, but it shortchanges the films seeming ambition to examine love as a theme. All that's left, then, are the superficial pleasures; the music, the clothes, the locations, and a couple of decent belly-laughs.
Playing By Heart is a 1998 comedy drama, directed by one Willard Carroll, with a surprisingly starry cast. Sean Connery, Angelina Jolie, Ryan Phillippe,, Jon Stewart, Dennis Quaid, Madeilne Stowe and Gena Rowlands are all part of the impressive ensemble. It's blandly shot, set to an eclectic soundtrack of pop songs, and set in the most middle class, glossily attractive parts of Los Angeles. It's a portrayal of a disparate group of characters in the city and their relationships and struggles with love. Its like a less ambitious, less accomplished, less interesting spin on superior multi-character LA dramas like Robert Altman's Short Cuts, Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia or Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon. Those films all grapple with multiple themes and deeper trends, with knotty social and emotional problems, and ultimately with life itself. Not Playing By Heart. It's about love, nothing more, nothing less. And that's ok. Love is a worthy and profound subject, and has inspired thousands of great works of art, from pop songs to poetry to novels to cinema. I'm just not sure that the romantic comedy is the genre best suited to discussing it. Well, perhaps the auteur-driven romantic comedy. Creative intelligences like that Woody Allen or Albert Brooks have done it with conspicuous success in the past. But the slick romcom, all effortlessly nice fashion, unconvincingly spacious homes, identity-less, boring music and predictably conventional storytelling? That sort of risk free, lazy film is all about love. But the form seems to prevent any sort of deeper consideration of the subject as a theme. The superficial and narrative elements never go far enough. Love is strange, but worthwhile, is the greeting card conclusion many such films seem to settle upon.
Crazy Stupid Love even includes the word in its title, and its characters openly discuss love as an intangible and an ideal on a couple of occasions. It centres around an interlinked - of course - collection of people in LA. Steve Carell plays a fortysomething whose wife, played with customary class and rawness by Julianne Moore, asks him for a divorce on a date one night. Sent reeling back clueless onto the singles scene he meets a dapper young stud, played by the effortlessly smug Ryan Gosling, who instructs him how to dress, talk and pick up women, before he himself falls in love. Meanwhile Carell's 13 year-old son is in love with his 17 year-old babysitter, who loves Carell and the links and contrivances go on.
There are moments of truth and some laughs in a script which sporadically pops with wisdom on the reality of marriage, for instance, or the cruelty of singledom. The attractive cast makes much of it work much better than it should; Carell's sincerity is nicely-deployed, and contrasts well with Gosling's preening self-regard.
Ultimately, however, it all climaxes in a series of farcical confrontations and public declarations; the kind of thing, in short, that happens exclusively in romcoms. It may provide narrative satisfaction, but it shortchanges the films seeming ambition to examine love as a theme. All that's left, then, are the superficial pleasures; the music, the clothes, the locations, and a couple of decent belly-laughs.
Monday, 26 September 2011
DRIVE
(Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011)
The film Drive reminded me of most is Stephen Soderbergh's Out of Sight. Not because they have anything at all in common in terms of story or style, mood or look. They don't. But because they are adaptations of fairly strong crime novels - in this case, of James Sallis' pared-down, hypnotically taut getaway-Noir story - which are elevated somewhat by directors with a thrilling sense of the cinematic.
Even then, elevated may not be quite the right word. Drive is a cracking genre entertainment, even if much of it is slightly over-familiar. The two films it has been most regularly compared with, Michael Mann's Thief and Walter Hill's The Driver, are both unavoidable points of reference. Just like Refn's film, each is a Neo-noir focusing on an existential romantic loner forced to choose whether to follow their code or discard it when an emotional attachment becomes a dangerous liability. But where Mann articulates the choice and makes it explicit and Hill turns it almost abstract while giving his world some of the grit and complexity of real life through a few characters and details, Refn instead opts to emphasise only the surface of his heroes situation. This is a movie movie through and through, and so we intuit that Goslings unnamed "Driver" follows some unspoken code, because we have seen similar characters do the same in similar films. This is pop-existentialism, without the seriousness or earnest ambition of Mann or Hill. For many, that can only be a good thing, for it makes Drive an easily accessible, narratively unpretentious film.
The simplicity of the set-up, the fairy-tale archetypes and the satisfyingly predictable genre beats give Refn time to focus on the style, and he has become a fine stylist. From the first scene, a forensically procedural account of the Driver at work, the visceral joy of driving is vividly present, and the sense of Los Angeles as seen through European eyes provides a pungent sort of cool which is only amplified by the 80s-esque electro pop on the soundtrack and Cliff Martinez's atmospheric score. Refn is excellent on the small, quiet moments, lingering just enough on Gosling and Mulligan during their (wordless) moony growing intimacy to let it register.
This all means that when violence intrudes into the story in the second half, it does so with a savage kick, and the shocking gore that follows - head-stampings, eye-stabbings, face-shootings - is all executed with near-unbearable power.
Gosling is all studied cool and charisma, suggesting just enough interior life to make it work, Mulligan may be slighly miscast but gets though on that lovely face and some clinging innocence, while stalwarts like Ron Perlman and Bryan Cranston offer excellent work in full-colour character parts. The stand-out performer, however, is Albert Brooks, frightening and believably cynical as a movie producer turned gangster.
Oddly, Brooks was also cast against type in Out of Sight, in which he also excelled.
Just like that film, Drive emerges as a dazzlingly executed piece of pure genre pleasure, and another fascinating cornerstone in Refn's growing career.
The film Drive reminded me of most is Stephen Soderbergh's Out of Sight. Not because they have anything at all in common in terms of story or style, mood or look. They don't. But because they are adaptations of fairly strong crime novels - in this case, of James Sallis' pared-down, hypnotically taut getaway-Noir story - which are elevated somewhat by directors with a thrilling sense of the cinematic.
Even then, elevated may not be quite the right word. Drive is a cracking genre entertainment, even if much of it is slightly over-familiar. The two films it has been most regularly compared with, Michael Mann's Thief and Walter Hill's The Driver, are both unavoidable points of reference. Just like Refn's film, each is a Neo-noir focusing on an existential romantic loner forced to choose whether to follow their code or discard it when an emotional attachment becomes a dangerous liability. But where Mann articulates the choice and makes it explicit and Hill turns it almost abstract while giving his world some of the grit and complexity of real life through a few characters and details, Refn instead opts to emphasise only the surface of his heroes situation. This is a movie movie through and through, and so we intuit that Goslings unnamed "Driver" follows some unspoken code, because we have seen similar characters do the same in similar films. This is pop-existentialism, without the seriousness or earnest ambition of Mann or Hill. For many, that can only be a good thing, for it makes Drive an easily accessible, narratively unpretentious film.
The simplicity of the set-up, the fairy-tale archetypes and the satisfyingly predictable genre beats give Refn time to focus on the style, and he has become a fine stylist. From the first scene, a forensically procedural account of the Driver at work, the visceral joy of driving is vividly present, and the sense of Los Angeles as seen through European eyes provides a pungent sort of cool which is only amplified by the 80s-esque electro pop on the soundtrack and Cliff Martinez's atmospheric score. Refn is excellent on the small, quiet moments, lingering just enough on Gosling and Mulligan during their (wordless) moony growing intimacy to let it register.
This all means that when violence intrudes into the story in the second half, it does so with a savage kick, and the shocking gore that follows - head-stampings, eye-stabbings, face-shootings - is all executed with near-unbearable power.
Gosling is all studied cool and charisma, suggesting just enough interior life to make it work, Mulligan may be slighly miscast but gets though on that lovely face and some clinging innocence, while stalwarts like Ron Perlman and Bryan Cranston offer excellent work in full-colour character parts. The stand-out performer, however, is Albert Brooks, frightening and believably cynical as a movie producer turned gangster.
Oddly, Brooks was also cast against type in Out of Sight, in which he also excelled.
Just like that film, Drive emerges as a dazzlingly executed piece of pure genre pleasure, and another fascinating cornerstone in Refn's growing career.
Wednesday, 19 January 2011
BLUE VALENTINE
(Derek Cianfrance, 2010)
Cianfrance's brutally honest relationship drama gets it's details right, and it captures emotional tones with painterly precision. Falling in love; an experience hopelessly fudged by so many romantic comedies, here beautifully captured in a few short, telling scenes. The agony and frustration of a toxic relationship, all repetitive arguments and stubborn misunderstanding, here portrayed with awful, microscopic perception.
The structure is so simple and yet undeniably effective: alternating between the end of a relationship and the beginning, Blue Valentine offers us a glimpse of how these two people might be happy together, before crushingly revealing - never obviously, always subtly, through character and behaviour - how their choices and decisions have made them so miserable together.
Cianfrance shoots the contemporary scenes in claustrophobic close-ups so that we're right there in the tight gap between these people, the backgrounds a haze of colour and abstraction. The flashback scenes are grainier but the mise-en-scene is looser, more accessibly attuned to environment, giving audience and characters room to breathe.
Some of the many ironies are a little too on the nose - calling the motel room where much key action occurs "the Future", for instance - but the script is impressively crafted in its ear for the rhythms of casual speech. Particularly great is the perfect capture of the way conversations can get away from people, from banter to a supernova of an argument in a few Ill-thought phrases, and how these things acquire their own momentum.
Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams are both extraordinary, capturing the contrast between their earlier youthful promise and joy and the weariness of later real life, and more besides, with beautiful naturalism. Grizzly Bear's music is a fine fit for the material, and Cianfrance proves he has a great eye and a feel for working with actors.
Finally, its quite emotionally devastating, and quite possibly the worst date movie ever.
Cianfrance's brutally honest relationship drama gets it's details right, and it captures emotional tones with painterly precision. Falling in love; an experience hopelessly fudged by so many romantic comedies, here beautifully captured in a few short, telling scenes. The agony and frustration of a toxic relationship, all repetitive arguments and stubborn misunderstanding, here portrayed with awful, microscopic perception.
The structure is so simple and yet undeniably effective: alternating between the end of a relationship and the beginning, Blue Valentine offers us a glimpse of how these two people might be happy together, before crushingly revealing - never obviously, always subtly, through character and behaviour - how their choices and decisions have made them so miserable together.
Cianfrance shoots the contemporary scenes in claustrophobic close-ups so that we're right there in the tight gap between these people, the backgrounds a haze of colour and abstraction. The flashback scenes are grainier but the mise-en-scene is looser, more accessibly attuned to environment, giving audience and characters room to breathe.
Some of the many ironies are a little too on the nose - calling the motel room where much key action occurs "the Future", for instance - but the script is impressively crafted in its ear for the rhythms of casual speech. Particularly great is the perfect capture of the way conversations can get away from people, from banter to a supernova of an argument in a few Ill-thought phrases, and how these things acquire their own momentum.
Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams are both extraordinary, capturing the contrast between their earlier youthful promise and joy and the weariness of later real life, and more besides, with beautiful naturalism. Grizzly Bear's music is a fine fit for the material, and Cianfrance proves he has a great eye and a feel for working with actors.
Finally, its quite emotionally devastating, and quite possibly the worst date movie ever.
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