(Tom McCarthy, 2015)
Spotlight has a great real-life story as raw material. It also has an outstanding cast of character actors and movie stars all committing fearlessly to this treatment of that story. What it does not have is a writer-director with any real feel for cinema.
That's not to say there is nothing to recommend in Spotlight; it is an engrossing, beautifully-acted procedural, with plenty of finely-observed details that bring the story and world to life. It's screenplay has some nice moments and a few fine characters.
Previous true-life procedurals like All the Presidents Men and the Insider combined sharp scripts and great actors with bravura direction. It's just that I don't think McCarthy is capable of "bravura". He is fantastic with actors, and this film is really well paced, giving out just enough exposition to keep an audience interested but never enough to slow things down so much that they might become bored.
The story follows a specialist team of reporters at the Boston Globe as they investigate a story of the Catholic Church and it's decade-long cover-up of paedophile priests. Those reporters are played by the likes of Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams while Liev Schrieber appears as the new Editor of the Paper, an outsider and Jew, who pushes for the story to the displeasure of most of the city, it seems.
McCarthy shoots it all like it's television. From 1997. Flat, "realistic" lighting, dull blocking and compositions. The camera moves little, and never with any real sense of purpose, either thematic or aesthetic. It feels as if he has learned to direct from a book of How to Direct. Directing: a Fools Guide, perhaps?
It's a shame, because this could and should be an important film about a hugely controversial topic. Instead it is a mediocrity; never bad - its far too tasteful for that - but never great either.
Showing posts with label Stanley Tucci. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stanley Tucci. Show all posts
Sunday, 27 December 2015
Sunday, 31 March 2013
JACK THE GIANT SLAYER
(Bryan Singer, 2013)
Perhaps the most irritating and pointless vogue in current cinema is the adaptation of fairytales into updated forms. Goth romances, horror stories, and worst of all; wannabe epic fantasy Lord of the Rings rips-offs.
Thats where we find Jack The Giant Slayer; turning Jack and the Beanstalk into a film full of battles and sieges and swords and rolling landscapes. As such, it's hard to say why it doesn't work. The script doesn't help; the characters are familiarly cliched types we've seen all too often, the situations mostly stale and similar to others from better films. The tone is odd - lying somewhere in that zone between family film and gritty adventure film but never quite sure of which it really wants to be, this is a film where giants bite human heads off, but we never see any blood. The humour is juvenile, ensuring we know these giants are flatulent snot-eating slobs, yet the emotional arcs are adolescent, with a hero and heroine (Nicholas Hoult and Eleanor Tomlinson, both pretty and utterly boring) who virtually fall in love at first sight, both yearning for escape and adventure, neither evincing much personality.
The effects are impressive, with most of the Giant sequences suitably frightening and awesome, and I can well believe that Singer wanted to make this film just so he could put together scenes like the one where we first glimpse a giant or the one where they rampage across a plain towards a city. Its well designed - if, again, a little too familiar in conception with its gritty grimy medieval look - and well-made, with nice photography by the reliable Newton Thomas Siegel, and the story rattles along.
But its really not enough.
It fades from the mind almost as you watch it, and it makes you wonder why Singer's career has started to drift in quite the way it has.
Perhaps the most irritating and pointless vogue in current cinema is the adaptation of fairytales into updated forms. Goth romances, horror stories, and worst of all; wannabe epic fantasy Lord of the Rings rips-offs.
Thats where we find Jack The Giant Slayer; turning Jack and the Beanstalk into a film full of battles and sieges and swords and rolling landscapes. As such, it's hard to say why it doesn't work. The script doesn't help; the characters are familiarly cliched types we've seen all too often, the situations mostly stale and similar to others from better films. The tone is odd - lying somewhere in that zone between family film and gritty adventure film but never quite sure of which it really wants to be, this is a film where giants bite human heads off, but we never see any blood. The humour is juvenile, ensuring we know these giants are flatulent snot-eating slobs, yet the emotional arcs are adolescent, with a hero and heroine (Nicholas Hoult and Eleanor Tomlinson, both pretty and utterly boring) who virtually fall in love at first sight, both yearning for escape and adventure, neither evincing much personality.
The effects are impressive, with most of the Giant sequences suitably frightening and awesome, and I can well believe that Singer wanted to make this film just so he could put together scenes like the one where we first glimpse a giant or the one where they rampage across a plain towards a city. Its well designed - if, again, a little too familiar in conception with its gritty grimy medieval look - and well-made, with nice photography by the reliable Newton Thomas Siegel, and the story rattles along.
But its really not enough.
It fades from the mind almost as you watch it, and it makes you wonder why Singer's career has started to drift in quite the way it has.
Monday, 31 December 2012
JULIE & JULIA
(Nora Ephron, 2009)
Really two movies in one, Ephron's film (perhaps unsurprisingly) adapts two books, twists them together into a sort of French plait, and just about makes it all work. It has the feel of a classic Hollywood entertainment; it's handsome, adroitly mixes drama and comedy, has a couple of strong roles for its leading ladies, and is never less than winning.
The twin storylines are shuffled throughout, usually in blocks of scenes, but occasionally within montages. The first follows legendary American cook/author/television personality Julia Childs (Meryl Streep) as she moves to Europe with her diplomat husband (Stanley Tucci) in the late 1940s, discovers French food and a sort of vocation as a cook and teacher, and begins to write her famous cookbook. The second follows Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a twentysomething on the brink of her thirties in contemporary New York who begins a project blogging an account of her attempt to cook every single recipe in Childs' book in one year.
For Powell, plainly struggling in a job that is a little beneath her after a promising youth, the blog gives her a focus and a vehicle for a writing talent she has almost abandoned, which is contrasted with the innocence and joy of Childs' attempt to become a cook buoyed by her own confident and enormous personality.
The pleasures here, then, are Ephron's often very witty screenplay, and her insistence on grounding the modern scenes in a recognisable - if very bourgeois - world of stressed commuting, tiring jobs, petty marital tensions and dreams that never really came true. Adams and Chris Messina (as her husband) are both charming as a perhaps too-perfect couple but their minor stresses ands problems are believably banal and contrast nicely with the Childs and their wandering across European cities due to his job, and more pointedly, with the spectre of McCarthyism and an inability to conceive a child which are more serious negatives in their married life.
Streep is characteristically fine, offering a great impression of Childs but not at the expense of any emotional subtlety, and Tucci is his usual reliable self, much of their work done against the backdrop of a picture postcard 1950s Paris, all golden sunlight and shuttered windows, again in sharp contrast with Powell's apartment above a Pizza parlour in Queens.
It all ends in blissful happiness and huge success, and is, of course, determinedly slight. But that is beside the point: it works extraordinarily well for the most part.
Really two movies in one, Ephron's film (perhaps unsurprisingly) adapts two books, twists them together into a sort of French plait, and just about makes it all work. It has the feel of a classic Hollywood entertainment; it's handsome, adroitly mixes drama and comedy, has a couple of strong roles for its leading ladies, and is never less than winning.
The twin storylines are shuffled throughout, usually in blocks of scenes, but occasionally within montages. The first follows legendary American cook/author/television personality Julia Childs (Meryl Streep) as she moves to Europe with her diplomat husband (Stanley Tucci) in the late 1940s, discovers French food and a sort of vocation as a cook and teacher, and begins to write her famous cookbook. The second follows Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a twentysomething on the brink of her thirties in contemporary New York who begins a project blogging an account of her attempt to cook every single recipe in Childs' book in one year.
For Powell, plainly struggling in a job that is a little beneath her after a promising youth, the blog gives her a focus and a vehicle for a writing talent she has almost abandoned, which is contrasted with the innocence and joy of Childs' attempt to become a cook buoyed by her own confident and enormous personality.
The pleasures here, then, are Ephron's often very witty screenplay, and her insistence on grounding the modern scenes in a recognisable - if very bourgeois - world of stressed commuting, tiring jobs, petty marital tensions and dreams that never really came true. Adams and Chris Messina (as her husband) are both charming as a perhaps too-perfect couple but their minor stresses ands problems are believably banal and contrast nicely with the Childs and their wandering across European cities due to his job, and more pointedly, with the spectre of McCarthyism and an inability to conceive a child which are more serious negatives in their married life.
Streep is characteristically fine, offering a great impression of Childs but not at the expense of any emotional subtlety, and Tucci is his usual reliable self, much of their work done against the backdrop of a picture postcard 1950s Paris, all golden sunlight and shuttered windows, again in sharp contrast with Powell's apartment above a Pizza parlour in Queens.
It all ends in blissful happiness and huge success, and is, of course, determinedly slight. But that is beside the point: it works extraordinarily well for the most part.
Friday, 30 March 2012
THE HUNGER GAMES
(Gary Ross, 2012)
Hunger Games is so derivative, feels so familiar, that watching it I felt as if I had seen it before, or at least read the book, neither of which is true. In certain cases, that can be a good thing. Some of the great stories - in cinema and other forms - give you that feeling of narrative déjà vu, because they resonate in a specific way or because they find a plot or a structural hook that seems obvious, as if it had always been there, somewhere in the ether, and they just stumbled upon it.
I'm not sure that is the case with this film. Rather it - and Suzanne Collins' novel, from which it is adapted - cannily peel various ideas from eclectic sources and twist them together with no little wit and intelligence. So we have a little "Enders Game", a lot of the obscenity of modern reality tv mixed with the way horrendous violence and tragedy are packaged for us by broadcast news, a bit of the gladiatorial arena, some Western imagery, some of the starry-eyed romance of teen fiction and a wealth of deadly-game-show tales from pop culture, from Stephen King's "The Running Man" through Battle Royale to Killraven.
That sounds unwieldy, but it holds together for a number of reasons. First there is the strong, simple plotting and storytelling. The world-building of the first act seems impressively effortless, the world and its conditions established within the first few scenes, and then gradually expanded upon. Partly this is possible because of the familiarity I mentioned above; we have seen enough future-worlds to understand a certain amount of shorthand in the portrayal of another one.
The world depicted here is an America after some future-War, now named Panem and split into 12 districts, each of which serve the existence and prosperity of the Capitol. Each year two tributes are chosen from each district, one male and one female, to compete in the Hunger Games, a televised gladiatorial battle to the death, from which only one contestant can emerge alive. Our protagonists are Katniss and Peeta (Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson) from the outlying District 12, which provides coal to power the Capitol while it's own residents freeze and starve to death. Katniss is a hunter and survivor, skilled with a bow and played by Lawrence with a sort of raw charisma: she stares down the camera with the same fearless beauty she directs at the colourfully-dressed peacocks of the Capitol. Peeta is more vulnerable, not least in his unrequited love for her, and Hutcherson plays him as close to a child, swinging between sweaty, crease-browed anxiety and puppy-eyed love.
Their encounters with the machinery beneath the Games and the Capitol shape the best scenes in the film, full of dry wit, blunt satire and some chilling resonances - the parallels with modern youth, shipped off to foreign wars, seem obvious. There are also some eye-catching supporting performances from Woody Harrelson, the perpetually underrated Elizabeth Banks and Stanley Tucci.
Much of the second half of the film is devoted to the games themselves, and here Ross stumbles somewhat. His direction is loose and handheld for the most part, giving much of the narrative an immediate, intimate feel which works well and helps hide the relative low-budget for a big sci-fi film by avoiding any outright money shots (the shots of the Capitol itself are quite fleeting and notable for their lack of detail in comparison to the teeming cityscapes of the Star Wars prequels, for instance).
That also gives him a methodology for the action scenes. The games themselves are a bloodthirsty spectacle of murder and violence, but this is a film aimed at, if not quite children, then pre-teens. So Ross shoots the action like everything else, his camera shaking and jumping around, tight to faces and figures, rarely pulling back to give a sense of scale or context. It gives them a visceral jolt in the best moments, but renders them oddly (literally) bloodless and thin in the worst.
Throughout, however, the storytelling remains gritty and powerful, offering up a series of tense set-pieces, satisfying face-offs and taut character beats, and Ross' style does well to capture the beauty of the green world of the forest and Lawrence's movie star presence.
As summer blockbusters go, then, this is raw, involving, intelligent entertainment.
Hunger Games is so derivative, feels so familiar, that watching it I felt as if I had seen it before, or at least read the book, neither of which is true. In certain cases, that can be a good thing. Some of the great stories - in cinema and other forms - give you that feeling of narrative déjà vu, because they resonate in a specific way or because they find a plot or a structural hook that seems obvious, as if it had always been there, somewhere in the ether, and they just stumbled upon it.
I'm not sure that is the case with this film. Rather it - and Suzanne Collins' novel, from which it is adapted - cannily peel various ideas from eclectic sources and twist them together with no little wit and intelligence. So we have a little "Enders Game", a lot of the obscenity of modern reality tv mixed with the way horrendous violence and tragedy are packaged for us by broadcast news, a bit of the gladiatorial arena, some Western imagery, some of the starry-eyed romance of teen fiction and a wealth of deadly-game-show tales from pop culture, from Stephen King's "The Running Man" through Battle Royale to Killraven.
That sounds unwieldy, but it holds together for a number of reasons. First there is the strong, simple plotting and storytelling. The world-building of the first act seems impressively effortless, the world and its conditions established within the first few scenes, and then gradually expanded upon. Partly this is possible because of the familiarity I mentioned above; we have seen enough future-worlds to understand a certain amount of shorthand in the portrayal of another one.
The world depicted here is an America after some future-War, now named Panem and split into 12 districts, each of which serve the existence and prosperity of the Capitol. Each year two tributes are chosen from each district, one male and one female, to compete in the Hunger Games, a televised gladiatorial battle to the death, from which only one contestant can emerge alive. Our protagonists are Katniss and Peeta (Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson) from the outlying District 12, which provides coal to power the Capitol while it's own residents freeze and starve to death. Katniss is a hunter and survivor, skilled with a bow and played by Lawrence with a sort of raw charisma: she stares down the camera with the same fearless beauty she directs at the colourfully-dressed peacocks of the Capitol. Peeta is more vulnerable, not least in his unrequited love for her, and Hutcherson plays him as close to a child, swinging between sweaty, crease-browed anxiety and puppy-eyed love.
Their encounters with the machinery beneath the Games and the Capitol shape the best scenes in the film, full of dry wit, blunt satire and some chilling resonances - the parallels with modern youth, shipped off to foreign wars, seem obvious. There are also some eye-catching supporting performances from Woody Harrelson, the perpetually underrated Elizabeth Banks and Stanley Tucci.
Much of the second half of the film is devoted to the games themselves, and here Ross stumbles somewhat. His direction is loose and handheld for the most part, giving much of the narrative an immediate, intimate feel which works well and helps hide the relative low-budget for a big sci-fi film by avoiding any outright money shots (the shots of the Capitol itself are quite fleeting and notable for their lack of detail in comparison to the teeming cityscapes of the Star Wars prequels, for instance).
That also gives him a methodology for the action scenes. The games themselves are a bloodthirsty spectacle of murder and violence, but this is a film aimed at, if not quite children, then pre-teens. So Ross shoots the action like everything else, his camera shaking and jumping around, tight to faces and figures, rarely pulling back to give a sense of scale or context. It gives them a visceral jolt in the best moments, but renders them oddly (literally) bloodless and thin in the worst.
Throughout, however, the storytelling remains gritty and powerful, offering up a series of tense set-pieces, satisfying face-offs and taut character beats, and Ross' style does well to capture the beauty of the green world of the forest and Lawrence's movie star presence.
As summer blockbusters go, then, this is raw, involving, intelligent entertainment.
Thursday, 19 January 2012
MARGIN CALL
(JC Chandor, 2011)
What Margin Call does so well is make an audience understand the broad themes of what happened in the Stock Market crisis in 2008. That it also manages to make of that hellish mess an involving drama seems a minor miracle.
It does that through good writing and some brilliant acting. Indeed, the quality of the cast testifies to the potency of debutant writer-director JC Chandor's screenplay. He follows 36 hours in the life of Junior risk analyst Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), who watches his boss (Stanley Tucci) get laid off in the morning, takes a file from him as he leaves - with the warning "Be careful" - runs the numbers that night, and realises that his firm is on the edge of financial Armageddon. From there, the crisis grows and climbs the links of the companys chain of command, through Peter's cocky-but-decent boss (Paul Bettany) and his boss, the tired and lonely veteran of the industry with both a beloved dog dying of cancer (canine symbol ahoy!) and moral objections to what is happening (Kevin Spacey), then up to the smooth young CEO (Simon Baker) before the company owner, a cynical old Billionaire who sees it all as a grand game (Jeremy Irons) is choppered in for a meeting of shareholders at 4AM.
These actors each get a moment or two to grandstand; a speech here, a dawning realisation there, a snippy argument then. Chandor is excellent on the polite, guarded politics in each room, the seniority and rivalry driving every conversation, but even better on the way this bombshell lands; the shock on their faces as they realise what is about to happen and what it means. Spacey probably has the greatest emotional journey to undertake, and he is the best he has been in a long time here, fragile with middle-age, his sometime bitchy ferocity gone soft and flabby with worry and guilt.
Perhaps wise to the publics cynicism about bankers and traders, Chandor is also careful to ensure that these people question themselves and their purpose in the face of crisis; Tucci recalls the practical difference he made in an earlier career as an engineer, Irons and Spacey both make separate arguments about their existence being worthwhile, even necessary. Meanwhile, Bettany gets to say "Fuck normal people" in a rant about public complicity.
All of this is tightly written, and the actors plainly relish the material. But Chandor cannot make this tale of offices and corridors visually exciting, for all his aerial views of nocturnal Manhattan. It is efficiently, often boringly directed, the single factor that makes me think it would work better as a theatrical piece than as a solid (or middling) film.
What Margin Call does so well is make an audience understand the broad themes of what happened in the Stock Market crisis in 2008. That it also manages to make of that hellish mess an involving drama seems a minor miracle.
It does that through good writing and some brilliant acting. Indeed, the quality of the cast testifies to the potency of debutant writer-director JC Chandor's screenplay. He follows 36 hours in the life of Junior risk analyst Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), who watches his boss (Stanley Tucci) get laid off in the morning, takes a file from him as he leaves - with the warning "Be careful" - runs the numbers that night, and realises that his firm is on the edge of financial Armageddon. From there, the crisis grows and climbs the links of the companys chain of command, through Peter's cocky-but-decent boss (Paul Bettany) and his boss, the tired and lonely veteran of the industry with both a beloved dog dying of cancer (canine symbol ahoy!) and moral objections to what is happening (Kevin Spacey), then up to the smooth young CEO (Simon Baker) before the company owner, a cynical old Billionaire who sees it all as a grand game (Jeremy Irons) is choppered in for a meeting of shareholders at 4AM.
These actors each get a moment or two to grandstand; a speech here, a dawning realisation there, a snippy argument then. Chandor is excellent on the polite, guarded politics in each room, the seniority and rivalry driving every conversation, but even better on the way this bombshell lands; the shock on their faces as they realise what is about to happen and what it means. Spacey probably has the greatest emotional journey to undertake, and he is the best he has been in a long time here, fragile with middle-age, his sometime bitchy ferocity gone soft and flabby with worry and guilt.
Perhaps wise to the publics cynicism about bankers and traders, Chandor is also careful to ensure that these people question themselves and their purpose in the face of crisis; Tucci recalls the practical difference he made in an earlier career as an engineer, Irons and Spacey both make separate arguments about their existence being worthwhile, even necessary. Meanwhile, Bettany gets to say "Fuck normal people" in a rant about public complicity.
All of this is tightly written, and the actors plainly relish the material. But Chandor cannot make this tale of offices and corridors visually exciting, for all his aerial views of nocturnal Manhattan. It is efficiently, often boringly directed, the single factor that makes me think it would work better as a theatrical piece than as a solid (or middling) film.
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