(Cornel Wilde, 1967)
Beach Red is the story of an American attack on a Japanese-held Island in the Pacific during World War 2. It opens with an almost 40 minute long sequence of the preparation for and action of the landing on the Island's beaches by the Americans, then follows one unit as they move inland, sending out various recon patrols and encountering pockets of resistance. This sort of material had been covered in a hundred films before, as well as in such novels as James Jones' "The Thin Red Line" and Mailers "The Naked & the Dead". But Wilde avoided the cliches of many of those films while adopting a sensitive, meditative approach suggesting he was aware of the novels. Beach Red uses several risky stylistic techniques in its attempt to tell this story differently. Wilde uses first person point of view shots. He throws in moments when we hear the men's musings in brief snatches of voiceover as they think their frightened, selfish, sentimental thoughts. His Captain thinks, a little comedically : "Would there be Wars if clocks were never invented?" Other men ponder their own fear of death, their chances of survival, their loved ones at home. He also features visual flashbacks, generally played out in artful montages of still photos, representing (surprisingly effectively) the memories playing through these men's minds under high stress. Men remember wives, lovers, children, houses. Several key men are given actual flashbacks, always to encounters with women. Wilde's own flashbacks to his wife (Wilde's then-wife Jean Wallace) are poetic and melancholy, the effect lessened slightly by images of his son playing with a toy gun leadenly intercut with shots of men dying on the battlefield.
If any of this sounds familiar, it may be because Wilde's film seems to have been a definite influence on Malick's sublime The Thin Red Line.
Beach Red features a moment where the advancing Americans troop though a field, passing by a still, ancient-looking native farmer, as does The Thin Red Line. Both feature cutaways to the Island's wildlife, both treat the Japanese defenders sympathetically, even acknowledging their inner lives (Wilde with flashbacks, Malick with a voiceover). Both feature conflict between pragmatic, stoic Sergeants and liberal, sensitive Officers. Beach Red may be Wilde's most beautiful film, it's lovely attempt to capture the play of shadow and light beneath the jungles canopy only slightly bettered by Malick's film. Wilde's film also seems to have influenced Saving Private Ryan, in the horrible violence of its beach landing scenes (which of course seem utterly tame in comparison with Spielberg's ordeal) and Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima in its even-handed portrayal of the Japanese side of the conflict. Violence and what it morally reveals about mankind was obviously a theme which interested Wilde, since it is central to The Naked Prey, Beach Red, and his next film as director, No Blade of Grass (1970). Beach Red stands out as a memorable and inventive combat film, and again its success is partly down to Wilde's determination to concentrate so singlemindedly upon the action at its centre. We are shown nothing of the wider campaign, and only learn of the men's pasts as they tell one another. Instead we follow them through this primordial jungle and all of the surreal horror of battle together. Distant explosions are picked out by Wilde's camera, but he is only really interested in what is happening inside these men as they deal with the violence closer to hand. The idea of violence reducing men somehow, tearing them away from civilization, is suggested. The film's most memorable moment may just be the one which best fuses the interior and exterior worlds of one soldier - as he lies dying by a tree, mentally listing his conquests, Wilde shockingly pours blood in a thick drip down a still photo montage, and the man dies.
Showing posts with label WW2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WW2. Show all posts
Sunday, 24 May 2015
Saturday, 23 May 2015
PHOENIX
(Christian Petzold, 2014)
Petzold's control just gets more nuanced and precise by the movie. This noir set in the rubble of post-war Berlin and haunted by the shadow of the Holocaust is a frustrating, cold but compelling watch until an extraordinary climactic scene transforms it into something transcendent.
Nina Hoss plays Nelly, a Berlin singer who has barely survived Auschwitz and is horribly disfigured. After plastic surgery, while she awaits transport to Palestine, she searches for her husband Jonny (Roland Zehrfeld) through the ruins of the city and eventually finds him working in a nightclub in the American sector. Assuming she is dead, he doesn't recognise her but sees that she somehow resembles his wife and involves her in a scheme which involves her pretending to be herself while he remakes her in Nelly's image, adjusting her walk, hair and make-up, buying her clothes...
In this way an entirely twisted romance plays out, as Nelly re-learns herself through the eyes of the husband who hid and protected her but may have given her up to save himself.
Petzold has a minimalist, deceptively simple style that demands much of his cast. But Hoss and Zehrfeld are equal to the task, each delivering in tricky parts. Hoss is sensational, evoking her character's traumatised fragility in her face but also her body language, then slowly blooming as she re-discovers her husband and the reality of her past. Zehrfeld is always conflicted by what he is doing: desperate yet furious with himself, drawn to this woman he knows cannot be his wife. That intense final scene is all about their faces and they are both immense, giving it an emotional charge which is shattering.
Prior to that the film is a noir and appropriately tense. Berlin is all shadows and bombed-out houses, off-duty US soldiers and furtive encounters in alleyways. Petzold prominently references Eyes Without A Face and Vertigo. And yet the holocaust gives his film a sting unlike either of those films, best manifested in the character of Lene (Nina Kunzendorf), working to get herself and Nelly to Palestine and sadly tracking down the evidence that the rest of their friends died in the camps. Her fate is cold and shocking, and it seems to foreshadow that ending, where Nelly's serial number tattoo is seen for the first time.
Petzold's control just gets more nuanced and precise by the movie. This noir set in the rubble of post-war Berlin and haunted by the shadow of the Holocaust is a frustrating, cold but compelling watch until an extraordinary climactic scene transforms it into something transcendent.
Nina Hoss plays Nelly, a Berlin singer who has barely survived Auschwitz and is horribly disfigured. After plastic surgery, while she awaits transport to Palestine, she searches for her husband Jonny (Roland Zehrfeld) through the ruins of the city and eventually finds him working in a nightclub in the American sector. Assuming she is dead, he doesn't recognise her but sees that she somehow resembles his wife and involves her in a scheme which involves her pretending to be herself while he remakes her in Nelly's image, adjusting her walk, hair and make-up, buying her clothes...
In this way an entirely twisted romance plays out, as Nelly re-learns herself through the eyes of the husband who hid and protected her but may have given her up to save himself.
Petzold has a minimalist, deceptively simple style that demands much of his cast. But Hoss and Zehrfeld are equal to the task, each delivering in tricky parts. Hoss is sensational, evoking her character's traumatised fragility in her face but also her body language, then slowly blooming as she re-discovers her husband and the reality of her past. Zehrfeld is always conflicted by what he is doing: desperate yet furious with himself, drawn to this woman he knows cannot be his wife. That intense final scene is all about their faces and they are both immense, giving it an emotional charge which is shattering.
Prior to that the film is a noir and appropriately tense. Berlin is all shadows and bombed-out houses, off-duty US soldiers and furtive encounters in alleyways. Petzold prominently references Eyes Without A Face and Vertigo. And yet the holocaust gives his film a sting unlike either of those films, best manifested in the character of Lene (Nina Kunzendorf), working to get herself and Nelly to Palestine and sadly tracking down the evidence that the rest of their friends died in the camps. Her fate is cold and shocking, and it seems to foreshadow that ending, where Nelly's serial number tattoo is seen for the first time.
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.
Friday, 31 October 2014
FURY
(David Ayer, 2014)
Fury is, at heart, an old-fashioned b-movie. It follows a young clerk (Logan Lerman) in the last months of the Second World War as the US Army moves into Germany. Reassigned to the Sherman tank commanded by a tough, enigmatic sergeant called Wardaddy (Brad Pitt) as a replacement for a gunner killed in their last, terrible firefight, the clerk - given the distinctly un-macho name "Norman" - has to grow up fast, learn to fight, and also fit into the tight crew of brothers who have lived inside "Fury" and under Wardaddy since they were in North Africa. These hardened, cynical, traumatised men include Shia Lebouef's born again Christian, Jon Bernthal's animalistic mechanic, and Michael Pena's stoic driver, bickering and joking their way through battles and downtime.
Ayer handles the battles very well. Though the film is composed almost exclusively of cliches familiar from more or less every other war film you've ever seen, it is handsome, epic and visceral. The tale may be familiar but this kind of thing hasn't been done all that often in the years since Saving Private Ryan showed how modern sensibilities would effect the way we make and watch war movies. So whilst Ayer undoubtedly glories in the adrenalised spectacle of violence here - in battle scenes that are generally coherent and impactful - his overall statement (and this is very much a film intent on making a statement, pumped up on its own seriousness and pomposity, with its cloyingly emotive Steven Price score and its stately Roman Vasayanov photography a symphony of browns, greys and greens, the usual colours of the European theatre of war) is that war is, well, hell, an unnatural crucible of terror and pain.
But the main constant in Ayer's work has been an appreciation for the pleasures of camaraderie and brotherhood, and here that colours his antiwar impulses; war may indeed be hell, he seems to say, but at least it makes men of boys and forges friendships deeper than any other emotional bond.
His film is accordingly at its best when these men are swapping insults and arguments, though a draggy mid-section interlude in a captured German town feels like an indulgent error, sapping the drama of some of its otherwise impressive dread.
It works for the most part. These cliches are cliches because they work so well, and Ayer and company deliver them well enough. The principals are all good, the action is exciting, the deaths as moving as they need to be. For a b-movie that wants desperately to be an a-movie, it works.
Fury is, at heart, an old-fashioned b-movie. It follows a young clerk (Logan Lerman) in the last months of the Second World War as the US Army moves into Germany. Reassigned to the Sherman tank commanded by a tough, enigmatic sergeant called Wardaddy (Brad Pitt) as a replacement for a gunner killed in their last, terrible firefight, the clerk - given the distinctly un-macho name "Norman" - has to grow up fast, learn to fight, and also fit into the tight crew of brothers who have lived inside "Fury" and under Wardaddy since they were in North Africa. These hardened, cynical, traumatised men include Shia Lebouef's born again Christian, Jon Bernthal's animalistic mechanic, and Michael Pena's stoic driver, bickering and joking their way through battles and downtime.
Ayer handles the battles very well. Though the film is composed almost exclusively of cliches familiar from more or less every other war film you've ever seen, it is handsome, epic and visceral. The tale may be familiar but this kind of thing hasn't been done all that often in the years since Saving Private Ryan showed how modern sensibilities would effect the way we make and watch war movies. So whilst Ayer undoubtedly glories in the adrenalised spectacle of violence here - in battle scenes that are generally coherent and impactful - his overall statement (and this is very much a film intent on making a statement, pumped up on its own seriousness and pomposity, with its cloyingly emotive Steven Price score and its stately Roman Vasayanov photography a symphony of browns, greys and greens, the usual colours of the European theatre of war) is that war is, well, hell, an unnatural crucible of terror and pain.
But the main constant in Ayer's work has been an appreciation for the pleasures of camaraderie and brotherhood, and here that colours his antiwar impulses; war may indeed be hell, he seems to say, but at least it makes men of boys and forges friendships deeper than any other emotional bond.
His film is accordingly at its best when these men are swapping insults and arguments, though a draggy mid-section interlude in a captured German town feels like an indulgent error, sapping the drama of some of its otherwise impressive dread.
It works for the most part. These cliches are cliches because they work so well, and Ayer and company deliver them well enough. The principals are all good, the action is exciting, the deaths as moving as they need to be. For a b-movie that wants desperately to be an a-movie, it works.
Friday, 21 February 2014
THE MONUMENTS MEN
(George Clooney, 2014)
I have to give The Monuments Men credit for making me desperate to rewatch The Train, John Frankenheimer's superb 1964 WWII action film which is similarly concerned with efforts to halt the Nazi attempt to steal all of the great art of Europe during the Second World War. I will also concede that the cinematography by Phedon Papamichael is occasionally lovely.
....and thats about it. Given this brilliant cast, what looks to have been an immense budget and intriguing subject matter, somehow George Clooney has managed to concoct a movie which is almost entirely underwhelming.
The disjointed, curiously inert story follows Clooney and his team of "monuments men", a collection of art experts, most of them too old for conscription, after they arrive in Europe to help retrieve the art of Europe stolen by the Nazis in the last year of the War. Alongside Clooney himself there are Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, John Goodman, Hugh Bonneville and Jean Dujardin. A fine cast, bolstered by Cate Blanchett as a Parisian Museum curator and resistance sympathiser. And yet none of them really registers much. Nothing registers much.
The drama mainly comes from various vignettes as the team - who split up into pairs for much of the second act, searching for lost art and leads in different corners of Western Europe - encounter a series of familiarly classic War situations, including snipers, levelled cities and firefights in the countryside, before reassembling to investigate the mines in which the Germans have hidden the art.
This drama is not very thrilling or memorable. It happens, and it's hard to care much about any of it. Damon has an extended storyline trying to persuade Blanchett to help him in PAris which goes on far too long without much of any human interest occurring. Major characters die, and despite Clooney's awful efforts at underlining and emphasising these tragedies and Alexandre Desplat's overblown, syrupy score; it is never moving in any way.
Likewise, none of the comedy works. Even Bill Murray struggles to wring laughs from this script, which seems oddly pleased with itself, even smug.
Clooney and his producing partner Grant Heslov wrote the script, and he gives himself a few monologues, but as a director he is unable to curb Clooney the actors worst impulses, and so he is all tics and sentimentality in his scenes. The other fine actors here don't really have characters to play. Damon is nice, Goodman is nice and old, Murray and Balaban bicker in an affectionate way, Dujardin is French, Bonneville is a polite, disgraced drunk. You really never learn much more about them than that.
Clooney is obviously trying to work with the kind of bold archetypes beloved of the mission movie - but it is almost as if he is too tasteful and careful a filmmaker to really sell them. And so instead he has a series of vague, empty figures who good actors render watchable but no more.
That may be the problem with Clooney as director - he is scrupulously tasteful, his films polite and intelligent and utterly dull and bloodless. With this type of material a bit more guts, a bit more vigour is necessary. And it's never here.
I have to give The Monuments Men credit for making me desperate to rewatch The Train, John Frankenheimer's superb 1964 WWII action film which is similarly concerned with efforts to halt the Nazi attempt to steal all of the great art of Europe during the Second World War. I will also concede that the cinematography by Phedon Papamichael is occasionally lovely.
....and thats about it. Given this brilliant cast, what looks to have been an immense budget and intriguing subject matter, somehow George Clooney has managed to concoct a movie which is almost entirely underwhelming.
The disjointed, curiously inert story follows Clooney and his team of "monuments men", a collection of art experts, most of them too old for conscription, after they arrive in Europe to help retrieve the art of Europe stolen by the Nazis in the last year of the War. Alongside Clooney himself there are Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, John Goodman, Hugh Bonneville and Jean Dujardin. A fine cast, bolstered by Cate Blanchett as a Parisian Museum curator and resistance sympathiser. And yet none of them really registers much. Nothing registers much.
The drama mainly comes from various vignettes as the team - who split up into pairs for much of the second act, searching for lost art and leads in different corners of Western Europe - encounter a series of familiarly classic War situations, including snipers, levelled cities and firefights in the countryside, before reassembling to investigate the mines in which the Germans have hidden the art.
This drama is not very thrilling or memorable. It happens, and it's hard to care much about any of it. Damon has an extended storyline trying to persuade Blanchett to help him in PAris which goes on far too long without much of any human interest occurring. Major characters die, and despite Clooney's awful efforts at underlining and emphasising these tragedies and Alexandre Desplat's overblown, syrupy score; it is never moving in any way.
Likewise, none of the comedy works. Even Bill Murray struggles to wring laughs from this script, which seems oddly pleased with itself, even smug.
Clooney and his producing partner Grant Heslov wrote the script, and he gives himself a few monologues, but as a director he is unable to curb Clooney the actors worst impulses, and so he is all tics and sentimentality in his scenes. The other fine actors here don't really have characters to play. Damon is nice, Goodman is nice and old, Murray and Balaban bicker in an affectionate way, Dujardin is French, Bonneville is a polite, disgraced drunk. You really never learn much more about them than that.
Clooney is obviously trying to work with the kind of bold archetypes beloved of the mission movie - but it is almost as if he is too tasteful and careful a filmmaker to really sell them. And so instead he has a series of vague, empty figures who good actors render watchable but no more.
That may be the problem with Clooney as director - he is scrupulously tasteful, his films polite and intelligent and utterly dull and bloodless. With this type of material a bit more guts, a bit more vigour is necessary. And it's never here.
Tuesday, 2 August 2011
CAPTAIN AMERICA
(Joe Johnston, 2011)
Like Superman, Captain America is a character much-derided by those (lets call them casual Super-hero fans) who favour edgier, seemingly more complex modern Super-heroes such as Batman, Spider-Man and Wolverine. That is somewhat understandable. On the surface, he seems an overly-literal, simple-minded creation. Visually he is a walking flag, resplendent in red White and blue, his costume encompassing both stars and stripes, together with little (eagle?) wings on the mask. His creation as a propaganda tool during the Second World War now makes him seem dated and irrelevant. His characterisation can be - in the wrong creative hands - reductive and silly, restricting him to the role of the big strong boy scout. Then there is the shield...
Well, Johnston's fun blockbuster addresses most of these issues and displays a fine understanding of just what makes the character of Captain America so compelling. Nicely grounded with a vivid grasp of a certain sort of zippily pop-cultural view of the Second World War which is perfectly suited to the character, the film spends its first act establishing its characters and making Chris Evans' Steve Rogers a truly likeable and sympathetic underdog. With the classical simplicity which is very much a hallmark of Marvels best characters, also present whenever nerdy Peter Parker cuts loose as the wiseass god of skyscrapers Spider-Man or when weedy, repressed Bruce Banner gives into his rage and levels buildings as the Hulk, Rogers' transformation into the "Super Soldier" Captain is made tremendously satisfying by how realistic, convincingly mounted and well-acted his sickly asthmatic beginnings are.
Indeed, Captain America gets its textures right throughout, stealing liberally from Raiders of the Lost Ark and sprinkling in some nice retro-futurist designs for its Hydra villains Nazis-with-black-magic World. There is also some wit in the details; the sequence where Rogers is used as a propaganda tool for selling War Bonds may just be the films best passage and actually provides an explanation for the ridiculous symbolism of that costume.
The cast give good accounts of themselves: Evans is convincing and winning throughout and effortlessly handles the action scenes, Tommy Lee-Jones is as good as ever in a one-note part, Hayley Atwell makes her vague cypher of an idealised strong 1940s Woman relatable and even affecting, and Hugo Weaving manages to make the Red Skull both disturbing and hilarious with what seems an outright Werner Herzog impersonation. The action scenes are competent if never inspired, but the patient pacing of the love story and Rogers' growth as a hero give it a surprising emotional charge by the slightly underwhelming, somewhat rote, underexplained climax. The coda, then, seems bizarre and even an attempt to shortchange the audience in advance of next years massive all-star The Avengers, which will feature this hero alongside Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk and Hawkeye.
It is also more than a little overlong, but its visual richness and the ease of the storytelling mean that Captain America mostly works as a fun summer blockbuster in its own right.
Like Superman, Captain America is a character much-derided by those (lets call them casual Super-hero fans) who favour edgier, seemingly more complex modern Super-heroes such as Batman, Spider-Man and Wolverine. That is somewhat understandable. On the surface, he seems an overly-literal, simple-minded creation. Visually he is a walking flag, resplendent in red White and blue, his costume encompassing both stars and stripes, together with little (eagle?) wings on the mask. His creation as a propaganda tool during the Second World War now makes him seem dated and irrelevant. His characterisation can be - in the wrong creative hands - reductive and silly, restricting him to the role of the big strong boy scout. Then there is the shield...
Well, Johnston's fun blockbuster addresses most of these issues and displays a fine understanding of just what makes the character of Captain America so compelling. Nicely grounded with a vivid grasp of a certain sort of zippily pop-cultural view of the Second World War which is perfectly suited to the character, the film spends its first act establishing its characters and making Chris Evans' Steve Rogers a truly likeable and sympathetic underdog. With the classical simplicity which is very much a hallmark of Marvels best characters, also present whenever nerdy Peter Parker cuts loose as the wiseass god of skyscrapers Spider-Man or when weedy, repressed Bruce Banner gives into his rage and levels buildings as the Hulk, Rogers' transformation into the "Super Soldier" Captain is made tremendously satisfying by how realistic, convincingly mounted and well-acted his sickly asthmatic beginnings are.
Indeed, Captain America gets its textures right throughout, stealing liberally from Raiders of the Lost Ark and sprinkling in some nice retro-futurist designs for its Hydra villains Nazis-with-black-magic World. There is also some wit in the details; the sequence where Rogers is used as a propaganda tool for selling War Bonds may just be the films best passage and actually provides an explanation for the ridiculous symbolism of that costume.
The cast give good accounts of themselves: Evans is convincing and winning throughout and effortlessly handles the action scenes, Tommy Lee-Jones is as good as ever in a one-note part, Hayley Atwell makes her vague cypher of an idealised strong 1940s Woman relatable and even affecting, and Hugo Weaving manages to make the Red Skull both disturbing and hilarious with what seems an outright Werner Herzog impersonation. The action scenes are competent if never inspired, but the patient pacing of the love story and Rogers' growth as a hero give it a surprising emotional charge by the slightly underwhelming, somewhat rote, underexplained climax. The coda, then, seems bizarre and even an attempt to shortchange the audience in advance of next years massive all-star The Avengers, which will feature this hero alongside Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk and Hawkeye.
It is also more than a little overlong, but its visual richness and the ease of the storytelling mean that Captain America mostly works as a fun summer blockbuster in its own right.
Friday, 3 June 2011
DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT
(Jan Nemec, 1964)
The opening scene is extraordinary; two boys race away from a train onto a hill, stumbling and scrambling upwards as the camera keeps pace in one long, incredible shot. The photography is severe in its contrast, deep black and shining white, with no grey in the frame. We hear shouts of "Halt!" in German and gunfire. The camera has drawn closer until we are in the boys faces, crowding them as they climb, panting and panicked, still part of that same single take.
Nemec doesn't give us much more than that as the film progresses. There are extended passages following the boys through the forest, watching them sleep, gingerly test their injured feet and drink from a stream. Later they will come across a farm, where a woman gives them food and drink and their dry gums bleed as they eat. The final act watches a ragged group of jolly old hunters gather and hunt them like animals.
This could almost be set in any conflict in the last century, anywhere on earth, which is obviously part of the point. These boys are figures in a landscape, and their humiliating capture by the old men seems like a statement about the generational conflicts in 1960s Czechoslovaka as much as it does one about the plight of Jews during WW2 or Czechs in the Sudetenland, for all that flashbacks seem to reveal that the boys have escaped from a train bound for a Nazi Concentration Camp. Flashbacks are an important part of Nemec's methodology, with the first one coming right at the end of that opening shot, and they are mostly elliptical and given no context or explanation. Instead they are dreamlike slices of imagery and impressionistic memory fragments: one of the boys riding a tram through Prague, meeting a girl, running through a field. In the farmhouse sequence there are flashes of fantasy as the boy imagine attacking the woman, or her seducing him. These flashes offer a relief from the unremittingly visceral experience which constitutes the majority of the film. It is an at times feverish portrayal of physical trial, by turns beautiful, bleak, baffling and provocative. It is also a terrifically confident and original debut film from a director whose career never matched his great potential.
The opening scene is extraordinary; two boys race away from a train onto a hill, stumbling and scrambling upwards as the camera keeps pace in one long, incredible shot. The photography is severe in its contrast, deep black and shining white, with no grey in the frame. We hear shouts of "Halt!" in German and gunfire. The camera has drawn closer until we are in the boys faces, crowding them as they climb, panting and panicked, still part of that same single take.
Nemec doesn't give us much more than that as the film progresses. There are extended passages following the boys through the forest, watching them sleep, gingerly test their injured feet and drink from a stream. Later they will come across a farm, where a woman gives them food and drink and their dry gums bleed as they eat. The final act watches a ragged group of jolly old hunters gather and hunt them like animals.
This could almost be set in any conflict in the last century, anywhere on earth, which is obviously part of the point. These boys are figures in a landscape, and their humiliating capture by the old men seems like a statement about the generational conflicts in 1960s Czechoslovaka as much as it does one about the plight of Jews during WW2 or Czechs in the Sudetenland, for all that flashbacks seem to reveal that the boys have escaped from a train bound for a Nazi Concentration Camp. Flashbacks are an important part of Nemec's methodology, with the first one coming right at the end of that opening shot, and they are mostly elliptical and given no context or explanation. Instead they are dreamlike slices of imagery and impressionistic memory fragments: one of the boys riding a tram through Prague, meeting a girl, running through a field. In the farmhouse sequence there are flashes of fantasy as the boy imagine attacking the woman, or her seducing him. These flashes offer a relief from the unremittingly visceral experience which constitutes the majority of the film. It is an at times feverish portrayal of physical trial, by turns beautiful, bleak, baffling and provocative. It is also a terrifically confident and original debut film from a director whose career never matched his great potential.
Tuesday, 22 February 2011
THE KINGS SPEECH
(Tom Hooper, 2009)
Colin Firth is the undisputed master of one type. If you have a character who's a repressed Brit, either Upper or Middle Class, displaying a classic case of stiff upper lip but with more violent passions running deeper beneath, then Firth is your man. Looking at his entire career, the films in which he does not play such a character can probably be counted on one hand.
He's played that role to death, won awards for it, done all he can with it. It's time he did something else, time he stretched himself. Play a drug dealer, a super villain. Do something, do anything, else.
Here he plays King George VI, engaging Geoffrey Rush's slightly eccentric speech therapist to aid in his battle with a stammer just as his brother abdicates the throne and he is forced to speak in public on a regular basis. He is predictably excellent, suggesting the buried anger and complexity of a man facing his own demons in public and for high stakes through the tiniest facial tremors and shifts of expression, his body language constricted and tense throughout. Rush is just as good, his colonial presence vital as perhaps the films only means of puncturing the pomposity of the British Royal family and all the ceremony surrounding it.
The film works best as a sort of a buddy movie about their two characters complete with a feelgood ending, and it has a fine supporting cast of British, Irish and Australian character actors (Timothy Spall as Churchill, Guy Pearce as the abducting David, Derek Jacobi, Michael Gambon, Jennifer Ehle) with Helena Bonham Carter particularly perfect as the Queen Mother, but director Hooper comes close to ruining it with some of his visual choices.
He favours frames with the characters - especially Firth's Bertie - isolated in the lower third, generally in a corner, an ocean of space stretching away from them. In some of the two-shots the ceilings fill half the frame in what seems almost parodic of Citizen Kane, and he uses wide angle and fish-eye lenses far more than is healthy for any film. All of this serves to tell us how isolated and pressurised Bertie is - how much is pressing down on him from above - while also functioning as a sort of visual metaphor for a stammer, echoing the frustration by leaving the image "unfinished" or cut off. In a few scenes it might have been effective, but Hooper leans on these devices so consistently that they become tiresome and almost laughable.
The script is solid and old-fashioned; it works and does what it sets out to do, and it really doesn't need this sort of rudimentary trickery to elevate it.
Indeed, Hooper's desire to elevate it is perhaps the best evidence of it's essential triteness. With its mythologising of a minor episode in Britsh history and glorification of a monarch, this is a scrupulously middle-brow film. Which explains much of it's Awards success.
Colin Firth is the undisputed master of one type. If you have a character who's a repressed Brit, either Upper or Middle Class, displaying a classic case of stiff upper lip but with more violent passions running deeper beneath, then Firth is your man. Looking at his entire career, the films in which he does not play such a character can probably be counted on one hand.
He's played that role to death, won awards for it, done all he can with it. It's time he did something else, time he stretched himself. Play a drug dealer, a super villain. Do something, do anything, else.
Here he plays King George VI, engaging Geoffrey Rush's slightly eccentric speech therapist to aid in his battle with a stammer just as his brother abdicates the throne and he is forced to speak in public on a regular basis. He is predictably excellent, suggesting the buried anger and complexity of a man facing his own demons in public and for high stakes through the tiniest facial tremors and shifts of expression, his body language constricted and tense throughout. Rush is just as good, his colonial presence vital as perhaps the films only means of puncturing the pomposity of the British Royal family and all the ceremony surrounding it.
The film works best as a sort of a buddy movie about their two characters complete with a feelgood ending, and it has a fine supporting cast of British, Irish and Australian character actors (Timothy Spall as Churchill, Guy Pearce as the abducting David, Derek Jacobi, Michael Gambon, Jennifer Ehle) with Helena Bonham Carter particularly perfect as the Queen Mother, but director Hooper comes close to ruining it with some of his visual choices.
He favours frames with the characters - especially Firth's Bertie - isolated in the lower third, generally in a corner, an ocean of space stretching away from them. In some of the two-shots the ceilings fill half the frame in what seems almost parodic of Citizen Kane, and he uses wide angle and fish-eye lenses far more than is healthy for any film. All of this serves to tell us how isolated and pressurised Bertie is - how much is pressing down on him from above - while also functioning as a sort of visual metaphor for a stammer, echoing the frustration by leaving the image "unfinished" or cut off. In a few scenes it might have been effective, but Hooper leans on these devices so consistently that they become tiresome and almost laughable.
The script is solid and old-fashioned; it works and does what it sets out to do, and it really doesn't need this sort of rudimentary trickery to elevate it.
Indeed, Hooper's desire to elevate it is perhaps the best evidence of it's essential triteness. With its mythologising of a minor episode in Britsh history and glorification of a monarch, this is a scrupulously middle-brow film. Which explains much of it's Awards success.
Sunday, 16 January 2011
THE ASCENT
(Larissa Shepitko, 1977)
Shepitko was a special, luminous talent. In The Ascent she transforms a seemingly simple tale of the flight, capture, interrogation and execution of some Belarussian partisans during WW2 into a Christian allegory and an investigation of faith. Her two protagonists cleverly represent different worldviews: one grimly determined to survive at any cost, the other arriving at a zen-like acceptance of his imminent death which Shepitko portrays as an almost Christ-like state of spiritual enlightenment.
She combines fine storytelling - the film works, in it's first half at least, as a genre piece, with battle scenes which are brutal and adeptly shot and edited - with superbly incorporated experimentation with sound and image. White noise rises up on the soundtrack at key points, and ambient sound is used similarly, often to signal a moment of spiritual ecstasy or revelation, while she uses a mobile camera often in the first act before opting for more static shots later in the film. The journey taken by the characters is echoed by this stylistic change, and also by a different palette; the first half is blindingly white, snow covering landscapes with dark tiny figures trudging through them. The second half is much darker, mainly interiors, allowing Shepitko to shoot her hero in glowing chiaroscuro as his spirit lightens with death approaching.
She was a filmmaker capable of pure cinematic poetry, as this film makes clear. And yet, her humanism is apparent too, because The Ascent is, as much as anything, incredibly moving. Her characters struggle with their fates, with the moral issues the Nazi occupation confronts them with, and Shepitko addresses most of it in the interrogation scenes, where a Police Inspector takes on each man and reads their characters precisely. He is the horror of collaboration personified, and we see the effect he has as the men and other condemned prisoners discuss their experiences and options in the hours before they will be executed.
That execution scene, when it comes, is an intense, almost unbearable scene of martyrdom and waste.
Shepitko died in a car crash in 1979. The Ascent was the last film she completed before her death.
Shepitko was a special, luminous talent. In The Ascent she transforms a seemingly simple tale of the flight, capture, interrogation and execution of some Belarussian partisans during WW2 into a Christian allegory and an investigation of faith. Her two protagonists cleverly represent different worldviews: one grimly determined to survive at any cost, the other arriving at a zen-like acceptance of his imminent death which Shepitko portrays as an almost Christ-like state of spiritual enlightenment.
She combines fine storytelling - the film works, in it's first half at least, as a genre piece, with battle scenes which are brutal and adeptly shot and edited - with superbly incorporated experimentation with sound and image. White noise rises up on the soundtrack at key points, and ambient sound is used similarly, often to signal a moment of spiritual ecstasy or revelation, while she uses a mobile camera often in the first act before opting for more static shots later in the film. The journey taken by the characters is echoed by this stylistic change, and also by a different palette; the first half is blindingly white, snow covering landscapes with dark tiny figures trudging through them. The second half is much darker, mainly interiors, allowing Shepitko to shoot her hero in glowing chiaroscuro as his spirit lightens with death approaching.
She was a filmmaker capable of pure cinematic poetry, as this film makes clear. And yet, her humanism is apparent too, because The Ascent is, as much as anything, incredibly moving. Her characters struggle with their fates, with the moral issues the Nazi occupation confronts them with, and Shepitko addresses most of it in the interrogation scenes, where a Police Inspector takes on each man and reads their characters precisely. He is the horror of collaboration personified, and we see the effect he has as the men and other condemned prisoners discuss their experiences and options in the hours before they will be executed.
That execution scene, when it comes, is an intense, almost unbearable scene of martyrdom and waste.
Shepitko died in a car crash in 1979. The Ascent was the last film she completed before her death.
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