(Jennifer Yuh Nelson, 2011)
An obvious and largely winning attempt to replicate the success of the original film by slavishly recreating every element that made it so popular, Kung Fu Panda 2 settles for efficiency rather than inspiration. That isn't a criticism; it works marvellously at extending snd deepening the world and characters of the first film whilst recreating the mix of faithful homage to Chinese Wuxia cinema and knockabout Jack Black comedy. Black is key to the tone here, always undercutting the intense drama or the sentimentality but allowing enough of it to remain that the film always has some emotional interest. The animation is fine, the action scenes thrilling, often beautiful, and well-conceived and choreographed in such a way that no live action film could possibly match, nicely mingling slapstick and action.
Gary Oldman is the villain, a role he could play in his sleep, and the whole thing races along from one set piece to another before an appropriately massive finale and the inevitable set-up for another sequel.
Sunday, 5 June 2011
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.
Thursday, 2 June 2011
X-MEN: FIRST CLASS
(Matthew Vaughn, 2011)
Once it's settled down into a regulation - if fun - Super-Hero blockbuster with heroes and villains set on a collision course in the massive climax, X-Men: First Class is no better or worse than most of the films released in it's sub-genre over the last decade. There is too much going on, some terrible cgi effects,and some impressive visual spectacle, all of it crammed into a ten minute sequence. But it works, nevertheless, because the first act in particular is a witty, superbly paced and nicely realised piece of expositional storytelling and character creation which lays out the conflicts and sets the stakes for all that follows.
Casting is key; Michael Fassbender finally takes on a movie star role as Magneto-to-be Erik Lensher, and the early sequences of his pursuit of Nazi War Criminals across the globe consciously evoke Connery-era Bond while providing the biggest charge in the film. Much of that is down to Fassbender, whose cold fury and dark charm make Ian McKellan's portrayal of Magneto in the earlier X-Men films look shamefully theatrical and hollow. James McEvoy matches him as Xavier, working a different sort of charm but never less than funny and appealing, and they share some of the film's best scenes. They are surrounded by a strong ensemble, with Kevin Bacon and January Jones lending class to stock villain parts, Rose Byrne all furrowed-brow seriousness as an awed CIA agent, and Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult giving the mutant angst some emotional impact.
The script creaks in places, but the first hour is so hyper-charged and stuffed with characters, locations and action, and Vaughn's hand so confident in his approach, that it positively gallops along, never really pausing for breath. The teen mutants - the "first class" of the title - are a weakness, each of them seeming utterly contemporary in a film set in the 1960s, none of them given much personality beyond their powers. But despite that, this is an assured, thoroughly satisfying summer blockbuster, and vies with Brian Singer's X-Men 2 for the questionable accolade of best X-Men film.
Once it's settled down into a regulation - if fun - Super-Hero blockbuster with heroes and villains set on a collision course in the massive climax, X-Men: First Class is no better or worse than most of the films released in it's sub-genre over the last decade. There is too much going on, some terrible cgi effects,and some impressive visual spectacle, all of it crammed into a ten minute sequence. But it works, nevertheless, because the first act in particular is a witty, superbly paced and nicely realised piece of expositional storytelling and character creation which lays out the conflicts and sets the stakes for all that follows.
Casting is key; Michael Fassbender finally takes on a movie star role as Magneto-to-be Erik Lensher, and the early sequences of his pursuit of Nazi War Criminals across the globe consciously evoke Connery-era Bond while providing the biggest charge in the film. Much of that is down to Fassbender, whose cold fury and dark charm make Ian McKellan's portrayal of Magneto in the earlier X-Men films look shamefully theatrical and hollow. James McEvoy matches him as Xavier, working a different sort of charm but never less than funny and appealing, and they share some of the film's best scenes. They are surrounded by a strong ensemble, with Kevin Bacon and January Jones lending class to stock villain parts, Rose Byrne all furrowed-brow seriousness as an awed CIA agent, and Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult giving the mutant angst some emotional impact.
The script creaks in places, but the first hour is so hyper-charged and stuffed with characters, locations and action, and Vaughn's hand so confident in his approach, that it positively gallops along, never really pausing for breath. The teen mutants - the "first class" of the title - are a weakness, each of them seeming utterly contemporary in a film set in the 1960s, none of them given much personality beyond their powers. But despite that, this is an assured, thoroughly satisfying summer blockbuster, and vies with Brian Singer's X-Men 2 for the questionable accolade of best X-Men film.
Friday, 27 May 2011
PRIME CUT
(Michael Ritchie, 1972)
Each of the films Michael Ritchie directed in the golden period right at the start of his strange directorial career expresses a degree of his satiric impulse. From the clear-eyed view of a competitive athlete in the superb Downhill Racer through the more explicitly satirical political subjects of The Candidate and Smile, irony and satire were part of Ritchie's default mode. Even Prime Cut, which is, on the surface, very much a pulpy crime thriller, has a broadly satirical, offbeat streak running through it.
The story follows Chicago Mob Enforcer Nick Devlin, under-played with macho cool by Lee Marvin, on a mission to retrieve a debt from Kansas City racketeer Mary Ann, a loquacious, charming Gene Hackman. Violence ensues.
In other hands that could be a generic piece of pulp, but Ritchie and screenwriter Robert Dillon twist everything just a few degrees off, which gives the material an unusual energy. The shift from the grimy urban desolation of 70s Chicago to the vast skies and yellow, sunlit fields of Kansas is vividly captured by Gene Polito's crisp cinematography, and Ritchie's great feel for place and atmosphere is evident in the portrayals of both locations. His early work all has a marvellously unforced, verite feel to it, and that sense in the context of a mob thriller gives the material a really distinctive charge. The rural setting for the violent confrontation at the heart of the narrative is put to good use in a series of odd set-pieces that flirt with satire themselves; from the scene where Marvin and Sissy Spacek are pursued across a cornfield by an enormous combine harvester to the gun-battle amidst sunflowers to the enormous destruction of a greenhouse, Ritchie makes his location work for him. Aside from the gentle satire of genre conventions, the film also suggests that crime and big business are much the same and makes a few vague points about people being treated like cattle (the opening credits capture a man being turned, literally, into sausage, and Hackman displays the young girls he trades in from his ranch in the stables). The characterisation is interesting too, from Marvin's quiet gallantry to Hackman's nervous chatter, and Dillon and Ritchie throw in some odd scenes which are not necessary to the narrative but do effect the mood and characterisation - notably a lengthy scene where Hackman and his brother roughhouse and wrestle, while mob bookmakers work away in the background but also some of the fairytale material between Marvin and Spacek. Indeed, the film plays like an action thriller spliced into a pop art fairytale, which may be the reason it is o little seen today.
None of that prevents the genre material from working, however, and Prime Cut contains a thrilling Final act, filled with chases, gunfights and the odd punch in the jaw.
All that and a great Lalo Schifrin score.
Each of the films Michael Ritchie directed in the golden period right at the start of his strange directorial career expresses a degree of his satiric impulse. From the clear-eyed view of a competitive athlete in the superb Downhill Racer through the more explicitly satirical political subjects of The Candidate and Smile, irony and satire were part of Ritchie's default mode. Even Prime Cut, which is, on the surface, very much a pulpy crime thriller, has a broadly satirical, offbeat streak running through it.
The story follows Chicago Mob Enforcer Nick Devlin, under-played with macho cool by Lee Marvin, on a mission to retrieve a debt from Kansas City racketeer Mary Ann, a loquacious, charming Gene Hackman. Violence ensues.
In other hands that could be a generic piece of pulp, but Ritchie and screenwriter Robert Dillon twist everything just a few degrees off, which gives the material an unusual energy. The shift from the grimy urban desolation of 70s Chicago to the vast skies and yellow, sunlit fields of Kansas is vividly captured by Gene Polito's crisp cinematography, and Ritchie's great feel for place and atmosphere is evident in the portrayals of both locations. His early work all has a marvellously unforced, verite feel to it, and that sense in the context of a mob thriller gives the material a really distinctive charge. The rural setting for the violent confrontation at the heart of the narrative is put to good use in a series of odd set-pieces that flirt with satire themselves; from the scene where Marvin and Sissy Spacek are pursued across a cornfield by an enormous combine harvester to the gun-battle amidst sunflowers to the enormous destruction of a greenhouse, Ritchie makes his location work for him. Aside from the gentle satire of genre conventions, the film also suggests that crime and big business are much the same and makes a few vague points about people being treated like cattle (the opening credits capture a man being turned, literally, into sausage, and Hackman displays the young girls he trades in from his ranch in the stables). The characterisation is interesting too, from Marvin's quiet gallantry to Hackman's nervous chatter, and Dillon and Ritchie throw in some odd scenes which are not necessary to the narrative but do effect the mood and characterisation - notably a lengthy scene where Hackman and his brother roughhouse and wrestle, while mob bookmakers work away in the background but also some of the fairytale material between Marvin and Spacek. Indeed, the film plays like an action thriller spliced into a pop art fairytale, which may be the reason it is o little seen today.
None of that prevents the genre material from working, however, and Prime Cut contains a thrilling Final act, filled with chases, gunfights and the odd punch in the jaw.
All that and a great Lalo Schifrin score.
BLOOD AND BONE
(Ben Ramsey, 2009)
A fight movie reminiscent of the low budget, often straight-to-video b-movies starring the likes of Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damme from the late 1980s and early 90s, Blood and Bone, while stuffed with cliches, succeeds splendidly on its own narrow terms.
Those cliches are wholeheartedly executed; with Michael Jai White's hero "Bone" a stoic, invincible superwarrior akin to a Western hero who fights his way through the LA Underground fighting scene on a specific mission of vengeance, taking on several quirkily individual fighters as he goes, all while becoming emotionally attached to the warm home of a foster mother and her children in a gang-infested area. His ultimate opponent is James, a sociopathic, upwardly mobile, Genghis Khan-quoting, samurai sword-wielding gangster played with effective intensity by Eamonn Walker. The drama is strictly second-rate, competently written and acted, and the few stabs at comedy barely register.
In a movie like this, action is everything, and Blood and Bone gets the action just right. Director Ramsey shoots many of the fights in single takes so that the action flows and the skills of the combatants are best displayed. The cuts he does choose are never gratuitous, and generally enhance the visceral impact of the events they frame. Many of the fighters are experienced MMA veterans, and while, as an actor, Michael Jai White seems capable of just one facial expression, he possesses undeniable charisma as a physical performer, while lacking the grace of a Jet Li or the comedic chutzpah of Jackie Chan, his explosive speed and power are beautifully captured here in some fantastically satisfying fight scenes. Even better, for fans of this sort of material, the ending promises a sequel, as Bone literally walks off into the sunset.
A fight movie reminiscent of the low budget, often straight-to-video b-movies starring the likes of Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damme from the late 1980s and early 90s, Blood and Bone, while stuffed with cliches, succeeds splendidly on its own narrow terms.
Those cliches are wholeheartedly executed; with Michael Jai White's hero "Bone" a stoic, invincible superwarrior akin to a Western hero who fights his way through the LA Underground fighting scene on a specific mission of vengeance, taking on several quirkily individual fighters as he goes, all while becoming emotionally attached to the warm home of a foster mother and her children in a gang-infested area. His ultimate opponent is James, a sociopathic, upwardly mobile, Genghis Khan-quoting, samurai sword-wielding gangster played with effective intensity by Eamonn Walker. The drama is strictly second-rate, competently written and acted, and the few stabs at comedy barely register.
In a movie like this, action is everything, and Blood and Bone gets the action just right. Director Ramsey shoots many of the fights in single takes so that the action flows and the skills of the combatants are best displayed. The cuts he does choose are never gratuitous, and generally enhance the visceral impact of the events they frame. Many of the fighters are experienced MMA veterans, and while, as an actor, Michael Jai White seems capable of just one facial expression, he possesses undeniable charisma as a physical performer, while lacking the grace of a Jet Li or the comedic chutzpah of Jackie Chan, his explosive speed and power are beautifully captured here in some fantastically satisfying fight scenes. Even better, for fans of this sort of material, the ending promises a sequel, as Bone literally walks off into the sunset.
Thursday, 26 May 2011
LOVE LIKE POISON
(Katell Quillévéré, 2010)
Katell Quillévéré's debut is that most French of things; a bourgeois drama. A coming of age drama set in provincial Northern France, at that. It deals with the age old tension between the burgeoning sexuality of an adolescent - in this case involving 14 year old Anna, played with a sensitive, subtle realism by Clara Augarde - and the religious feeling still important in the small town world which has influenced her childhood. Quillévéré widens her gaze past Anna to include her immediate family, the young Parish priest whose own faith is being shaken by the attention given to him by Anna's mother, and her ailing Grandfather, unrepentant and spirited in the face of his own mortality.
Anna, and more specifically her flowering beauty and newly sexual presence, is a catalyst in the stories of the surrounding characters, awakening something in her Grandfather (he gets an erection while she washes him), perhaps prompting the doubts in her priest with her questions about faith and belief, and making her mother feel more conscious of her own age and waning attractiveness.
While this could be heavy material, Quillévéré keeps it light and almost peppy. Scenes are mainly short and elliptical and the narrative skips between characters, punctuated with an eclectic, telling soundtrack made up of choral music to represent Anna's spiritual impulses, English traditional folk to represent her connection with the countryside (this is the kind of film where people are always taking walks) and her Grandfather's 50s French Pop, to represent more hedonistic, secular pleasures.
The characters are well-rounded, believable people and the themes skilfully interwoven with the fragile plot; Quillévéré is undoubtedly a talented writer. There are a couple of extremely intense scenes where Anna confronts her sexuality head-on, and the way the Church scenes have a different rhythm - fewer cuts and a smoothly mobile camera - reveal some directorial talent. But largely the film is visually pedestrian, the work of a director still discovering her style.
The warmth and resonance of the world and characters depicted here partly compensate, but only partly.
Katell Quillévéré's debut is that most French of things; a bourgeois drama. A coming of age drama set in provincial Northern France, at that. It deals with the age old tension between the burgeoning sexuality of an adolescent - in this case involving 14 year old Anna, played with a sensitive, subtle realism by Clara Augarde - and the religious feeling still important in the small town world which has influenced her childhood. Quillévéré widens her gaze past Anna to include her immediate family, the young Parish priest whose own faith is being shaken by the attention given to him by Anna's mother, and her ailing Grandfather, unrepentant and spirited in the face of his own mortality.
Anna, and more specifically her flowering beauty and newly sexual presence, is a catalyst in the stories of the surrounding characters, awakening something in her Grandfather (he gets an erection while she washes him), perhaps prompting the doubts in her priest with her questions about faith and belief, and making her mother feel more conscious of her own age and waning attractiveness.
While this could be heavy material, Quillévéré keeps it light and almost peppy. Scenes are mainly short and elliptical and the narrative skips between characters, punctuated with an eclectic, telling soundtrack made up of choral music to represent Anna's spiritual impulses, English traditional folk to represent her connection with the countryside (this is the kind of film where people are always taking walks) and her Grandfather's 50s French Pop, to represent more hedonistic, secular pleasures.
The characters are well-rounded, believable people and the themes skilfully interwoven with the fragile plot; Quillévéré is undoubtedly a talented writer. There are a couple of extremely intense scenes where Anna confronts her sexuality head-on, and the way the Church scenes have a different rhythm - fewer cuts and a smoothly mobile camera - reveal some directorial talent. But largely the film is visually pedestrian, the work of a director still discovering her style.
The warmth and resonance of the world and characters depicted here partly compensate, but only partly.
Sunday, 22 May 2011
WIN WIN
(Tom McCarthy, 2011)
Win Win is a recession-era comedy drama stripped of any rage or passion about the times which give the film its setting. It focuses on Paul Giamatti's small town New Jersey lawyer as he struggles to keep his head above water financially, running his struggling business and providing for his family, while coaching a High School Wrestling team in his spare time. Everything is complicated by the arrival into his life of the teenage Grandson of an elderly client who happens to be a talented wrestler.
The neatness of that premise is reflected in more or less every aspect of the film. It is a safe, careful drama with some comedy, never overly ambitious, only mildly funny, scrupulously modest in its aims and achievements. McCarthy crafts believable, warmly likeable characters and his fine cast bring them nicely to life, with Giamatti and Amy Ryan (as his wife) as dependably solid as ever. One key role is miscast however; as the teen Wrestler, Alex Schaffer is adequate in the early, monosyllabic scenes, but once required to tackle more dialogue his work suffers. He is good in the wrestling scenes, which work well enough.
But then everything works, while nothing works brilliantly, and this is the films problem. McCarthy is competent as a visual director, solid as a storyteller, but there is not one transcendent moment in this film, no belly laughs or truly moving dramatic scenes, no truths captured, no beauty on display. His compositions are workmanlike, the lightng and colours flat and anonymous, the soundtrack virtually sublimnal (the use of the National over the end credits may in fact be the highlight of the film). It is pedestrian, utterly predictable in its middlebrow tastefulness. Never a struggle and a mildly enjoyable experience, Win Win represents a slightly dispiriting trend within American Indie cinema; the rise of the middl of the road Adult-oriented comedy-drama.
Win Win is a recession-era comedy drama stripped of any rage or passion about the times which give the film its setting. It focuses on Paul Giamatti's small town New Jersey lawyer as he struggles to keep his head above water financially, running his struggling business and providing for his family, while coaching a High School Wrestling team in his spare time. Everything is complicated by the arrival into his life of the teenage Grandson of an elderly client who happens to be a talented wrestler.
The neatness of that premise is reflected in more or less every aspect of the film. It is a safe, careful drama with some comedy, never overly ambitious, only mildly funny, scrupulously modest in its aims and achievements. McCarthy crafts believable, warmly likeable characters and his fine cast bring them nicely to life, with Giamatti and Amy Ryan (as his wife) as dependably solid as ever. One key role is miscast however; as the teen Wrestler, Alex Schaffer is adequate in the early, monosyllabic scenes, but once required to tackle more dialogue his work suffers. He is good in the wrestling scenes, which work well enough.
But then everything works, while nothing works brilliantly, and this is the films problem. McCarthy is competent as a visual director, solid as a storyteller, but there is not one transcendent moment in this film, no belly laughs or truly moving dramatic scenes, no truths captured, no beauty on display. His compositions are workmanlike, the lightng and colours flat and anonymous, the soundtrack virtually sublimnal (the use of the National over the end credits may in fact be the highlight of the film). It is pedestrian, utterly predictable in its middlebrow tastefulness. Never a struggle and a mildly enjoyable experience, Win Win represents a slightly dispiriting trend within American Indie cinema; the rise of the middl of the road Adult-oriented comedy-drama.
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