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.

HOMEFRONT

(Gary Fleder, 2013)

Very much like an action thriller from another era - theres a lot of the 1980s here, and possibly even more of the 1970s - Homefront is never quite brave enough to go all-out to satisfy the sort of pulp cravings those movies effortlessly catered to.
Despite the presence of Jason Statham in the lead as retired undercover cop Phil Broker, director Fleder makes it all a little too slick and a little too mainstream to work. The screenplay - by Sylvester Stallone, a reliably canny creator in terms of base action thrills - is brutal and simplistic and classical in construction. Broker and his 9 year old daughter are living in a small Louisiana town after his (pre-credits) involvement in a massive operation to bring down a Biker gang ended in much bloodshed. A schoolyard altercation between his daughter and a bully escalates until the local drug kingpin, Gator Bodine (James Franco, surprisingly bland) becomes involved, discovers who Broker is, and calls in the Biker gang for help in disposing of this quiet man with devastating combat acumen.
The smalltown Louisiana setting works well, and the cast is unexpectedly starry for this sort of material, with the likes of Kate Bosworth and Winona Ryder both good in small parts as desperate women of different stripes, and Frank Grillo reliably nasty as a Biker assassin.
Fleder can do action competently, too, and Statham has a few impressive fight scenes. But competence is about as good as it gets. Its never delirious enough or offensively violent enough or bleak enough or funny enough. It sets up its familiar story, you know exactly what will happen, then that happens.
Which is perhaps what many Statham fans want of a Statham film. But he's capable of more. Films like this - with a sprinkling of cinematic pedigree - are small steps towards something more.
And its frustrating when they don't get there.

THE LEGO MOVIE

(Phil Lord, Chris Miller, 2014)

The Lego Movie is the most satisfying kids film since the period a few years ago when Pixar was still reliably great. It manages to be hilarious, bitingly satirical, exciting, thought-provoking, epic and consistently visually inventive throughout. Considering it's based on the brick construction system toys, that is an impressive feat.
Writer-directors Lord and Miller see the potential in the property to craft an ambitious, energetically tangential story which is full of references to other movies, in-jokes, post-modern gags and lots of nods to the adults in the audience.
At heart, its a remake of the Matrix, with its "chosen one" story focused on Emmet (voiced by Chris Pratt), a construction worker who is happy to conform, and ardent in his desire to be just like everyone else. He follows the "instructions", a book informing residents exactly how to live (buy overpriced coffee, listen to popular music - "Everything Is Awesome" is a horrific earworm after a single viewing of this film). These brief scenes are a dazzlingly paced, brilliantly funny satire on conformity and consumerism, and they quickly give way to a brilliant action scene after Emmet stumbles across a mysterious artefact which bonds to his body, is questioned and one the verge of execution at the hands of Bad Cop (Liam Neeson) before he is rescued by Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), a "master builder" who can create lego vehicles in seconds.
She explains the plot to him (in a scene which typically, cheerfully thumbs its nose at the very idea of such expository scenes): President Business (Will Ferrell) is set on destroying the Universe with his ultimate weapon, the Kangle (a tube of glue) which can only be stopped with the artefact stuck to Emmet's back. With Bad Cop on their trail, Emmet, Wyldstyle and her boyfirend Batman (hilariously characterised as a bit of a jockish dick, in love with his own dark and mysterious image and beautifully voiced by Will Arnett) jump across zones in this odd Lego Universe, from the Old West to "Middle Zealand" to Cloud Cuckoo Land, meeting a collection of recognisable pop culture characters and lego figures along the way.
From there it only gets more ambitious and epic, until a final act revelation which recontextualises and deepens everything we have seen suggests that this is actually that rarest thing; a transcendent kids film.
Besides that it is consistently laugh-out-loud funny, fantastically exciting, and truly beautiful in its inventive use of the possibilities of the lego-verse.

DALLAS BUYERS CLUB

(Jean-Marc Valleé, 2013)

Somehow less than the sum of it's parts, Valleé's biopic of Ron Woodruff, an AIDS patient in 1980s Dallas who confounds the Medical establishment and defies the FDA by importing unapproved drugs from Mexico, Japan, Holland and Israel is nevertheless filled with good things.
Most notable of those is another in what is becoming a long series of great Matthew McConaughey performances. Ridiculous 50 pound weight-loss aside, he plays Woodruff as a swaggering good old boy and unabashed homophobe who is transformed by his efforts to manage his own condition and his encounters with fellow (mostly gay) sufferers. Expansive, charismatic and funny, Woodruff's journey is predictable but made believable by McConaughey never playing it easy - he starts to help people because he sees an opportunity to make money, and his eventual softening towards extroverted Drag Queen Rayon (Jared Leto, similarly excellent) is slow and authentically scarred by misunderstanding and prejudice.
The plot kicks in once Woodruff has been diagnosed and begins to investigate possible treatments. A sojourn in a Mexican clinic convinces him that treating symptoms is the way to go, and he begins importing drugs in huge quantities and exploiting a legal loophole by selling memberships in a "Buyers Club" which entitles it's members to free medication. Along the way he encounters homophobia alongside the opposition of the FDA and the IRS. He is supported by a kindly doctor (Jennifer Garner), and finds his friendship with her and Rayon more fulfilling than the macho bluster he shared with his old friends, who all shun him after his diagnosis.
Valleé keeps his style loose and edgy, finding the beauty in trailer parks and motel lots, using an electric buzz on the soundtrack to signal vividly the moments when Woodruff's illness gets the better of him.
But the screenplay is a little trite, a little repetitive, a little too by-numbers, and it never really feels worthy of the performances of this cast or director.

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS

(Joel & Ethan Coen, 2013)

Great filmmakers - great artists, in fact, be they novelists, playwrights, comedians, poets -  have the ability to capture how it feels to be alive. The Coen Brothers absolutely possess this ability. It gets forgotten, almost, lost in the rush to praise their brilliant screenplays, beautiful visual sense and their storytelling talent. What the mainstream brands as "quirky" is their incredible ability to combine comedy and drama so that certain scenes and passages in their best work play out. Half the audience will be laughing at the deadpan wit, the beautifully observed characters, the other half sit in silence, appreciating the human drama on display. Sometimes of course, they lean more in one direction than the other. There are the outright comedies, like Raising Arizona or Intolerable Cruelty. And the dramas: No Country for Old Men or Millers Crossing, say. But it is never simple. Anton Chigurgh in No Country for Old Men is as funny as any creation in the Coens' filmography for all that he is a terrifying character in a mostly serious film. There is pathos in Raising Arizona, despite its Tex Avery comic invention.
What never changes are those moments of truth: what it is to be alive, captured in an instant, an image, a beat. Songwriters and singers do that too, which is one of the subjects of Inside Llewyn Davis. A character study of the titular figure, a struggling folk-singer in '60s Greenwich Village, played with world-weary cynicism and muted sadness by Oscar Isaac, it is a classic Coens mix of comedy and drama. Llewyn is on the downslope of a career that never really went anywhere, and he only truly realises that during the course of the story, appalled as he is by what passes for folk music around him.
His life is a ruin. He sleeps on the couches of friends, many of whom he doesn't even seem to like or respect, has no money to buy himself a coat despite the fact that it's winter, and doesn't plan for the future. His sister's suggestion that he give up music and return to life as a merchant seaman is met with the words "Just exist?"
His closest friends are Jim (Justin Timberlake) and Jean (Carey Mulligan), a folk duo. Jean is pregnant, possibly by Llewyn, and her every word in his direction positively drips venom. It becomes apparent that he uses people, and though he is never warm or nice, his essential humanity, the loneliness of his situation and his effortless capacity for self-destruction, does make him sympathetic.
A long, surreal road trip to Canada alongside a loquacious hipster (John Goodman) and his laconic driver (Garrett Hedlund) is Llewyn's breaking point, and perhaps features the film's most beautiful and haunting sequences, as Bruno Delbonnel's exquisitely soft and dank cinematography captures several breathtaking scenes of nocturnal driving; snow drifting across highways, cities glimpsed off in the night.
The music is great, the cast perfect, the clockwork collapse of Llewyn's hopes and dreams hilarious and gruelling in equal measure.

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

(Martin Scorsese, 2013)

Blame Goodfellas. That more-or-less universally adored 1990 film was a comeback of sorts for Martin Scorsese, and it remains perhaps his most ostentatiously "directed" work; with its use of slow motion, freeze-frames and its reverse dolly zooms, it positively begs an audience to notice the hand of the filmmaker throughout. No wonder it's been so very influential (films from Blow to Boogie Nights to Mesrine and American Hustle all ape Goodfellas to various degrees) - it is one of those films that makes the director look like the main man.
That hadn't been quite the case prior to that in Scorsese's career. His films had always looked good, always featured dazzling sequences, showcasing his talent as a visual stylist, but never before had they been quite so joyously excessive. Since the huge critical and commercial success of Goodfellas, Scorsese revisits that style every couple of films and adapts it slightly for others. It has become his style, in effect. The shame of this is that it now seems self-parodic, or as one critic has put it, "Scor-cese" (as in journalese). A sort of hackneyed visual idiolect.
The Wolf of Wall Street is possibly the purest expression of that style imaginable.
A wicked, hilarious, epic black comedy following the rise and fall of Wall Street stockbroker turned fraudster Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), the rambling, episodic storyline allows Scorsese to show us many of his tricks. The plot - filled as it is with an incredible amount of sequences of sex, drugs and general debauchery - allows for this, with the narrative asking that various altered states need to be interpreted somehow.
Like Goodfellas, it's largely told in flashback, narrated by a self-aware protagonist who actually talks directly to the audience, breaks off explaining things because they don't really matter, and generally glories in the twists and turns of his own story. That story is rich in supporting characters, most obviously embodied by Jonah Hill as Jordan's right-hand man, Donny, and Margot Robbie as his beautiful second wife, Naomi. As Jordan's activities become more lucrative and less legal, his habits swell until he is seemingly constantly enjoying either drugs or prostitutes (often both). Perhaps the standout sequence is a long quallude high which plays out like brilliant slapstick comedy.
This is probably Scorsese's funniest film. The silly debate over whether or not the director intends us to admire these people ignores the fact that they - and their babylonian excesses - are funny whether or not you admire them. That begins with Matthew McConaughey, whose cameo role as Jordan's mentor revolves around a standout sequence where he openly snorts coke over lunch in a restaurant, then begins a chest-beating anthem to Wall Street after revealing the secret con of the entire system to the younger man. Also hilarious is Rob Reiner as Jordan's father.
They are balanced somewhat by Kyle Chandler, somehow creating a layered individual out of an underwritten FBI agent who becomes Jordan's nemesis.
It is only with his arrival that the film really acquires a plot, as Jordan desperately seeks to cover his back and hide his money before the government catch up to him.
There are many dazzling scenes here - Scorsese is still a master, after all - but it is massively overlong, numbingly repetitive and strangely empty (which is perhaps the point, admittedly).
DiCaprio holds it together well, despite several of his co-stars walking away with their every scene, and  despite a seemingly random selection of tunes on the soundtrack (once a definite Scorsese specialty), this is genuinely, roundly entertaining throughout.
But from a master given this sort of canvas to work on, is that really enough?

PETULIA

(Richard Lester, 1968)

Petulia is very much a neglected or lost classic. Many "lost" films gain that status because they are commercial failures upon their release, and this was the fate of Petulia. Lester had a strange, uneven career, and is probably best-remembered today for his two films for the Beatles, A Hard Days Night and Help!, or his later big budget work for the Salkinds on the Musketeers films and Superman 2. But he made a handful of great films, and even his lesser work is interesting, and, particularly in his early career, extremely distinctive visually. After the failure of Petulia, and even more catastrophically, his surreal film of Spike Milligan's post-apocalyptic satire The Bed Sitting Room, Lester turned away from cinema for a few years, and when he returned his vision seemed trained intently on the past, with the exception of the allegorical disaster movie Juggernaut. He made a series of excellent costume spectacles, starting with the Three Musketeers and perhaps peaking with the beautiful Robin & Marian in 1976. But he seemed to lose any appetite for the politically engaged, topical cinema he had created in the 60s, which is a shame considering the quality of films like the Knack, and particularly Petulia.

The film traces the brief affair between Archie Bollen (George C. Scott), a San Francisco doctor in the middle of an emotionally confused divorce, and Petulia Danner (Julie Christie), a young socialite who is troubled by the complications in her marriage to David (Richard Chamberlain). Lester combines this love story with a damning indictment of a changing America in the late 1960s. The film is full of allusions to violence - car accidents, brutal wife-beating, the Vietnam War endlessly playing on television - and the dehumanising aspects of technology. This is a city where supermarkets open 24 hours a day, and become empty temples to consumerism by night, as suggested by the shot of Petulia and Archie pushing round a trolley loaded with food he doesn't want. The motel they visit is automated, as is the greenhouse Archie recieves as a present, with its "lights that work better than the sun".

But the pleasures of Petulia are primarily sensual. Before revealing himself to be a visionary Director, Nic Roeg was an amazing Director of Photography - his work on Far From the Madding Crowd and Farenheit 451 being the best examples - and, on Petulia, he and Lester worked together to give the film a unique look and style. Its pallette is composed of warm but luminous colours, and since many of the scenes were shot on location in Haight & Ashbury, the background is always vivid and interesting. Lester makes several references to Hitchcock's use of San Francisco in Vertigo, but stylistically, his work seems more influenced by the French New Wave, with his jump-cuts and elliptical editing, and Roeg's compositions often finding characters framed by objects, and even the city itself seen through the lines of the Golden Gate Bridge.


The story is told with the aid of many flashbacks and flash-forwards, and scenes are interrupted by brief snatches of scenes from earlier or later in the narrative. Sometimes they seem to suggest the characters are being jolted by memories or premonitions, but they are also used as thematic signifiers so that Lester can juxtapose two images, as in the moment where Archie flinches at the violence at a Roller Derby because it reminds him of finding Petulia's battered body in his apartment, and the film seems to be making a connection between the prevalence of violence in modern culture and its influence on personal behavior. These flash-cuts also serve to emphasise the theme of miscommunication, as Archie and Petulia struggle to get through to each other throughout the film. Indeed, the only time the rhythm of the editing really slows down is in the scene between Petulia and David near the film's end, where a reconciliation seems possible.

John Barry had worked with Lester on the Knack, and his score for Petulia, recently sampled by the Cinematic Orchestra, is one of his most romantic and moving. Indeed, the film itself is extremely moving. It starts off seeming a little dated, with its cuts to Scott wandering around a psychedelic club and Christie's determinedly kooky behaviour, but both actors give tremendous performances. Scott, always slightly ill-at-ease in a suit, his bullish form too reined in, allows some melancholy and vulnerability to drip into the fierceness and sourness his screen presence always provides. Christie was perhaps at the apex of her spectacular beauty in 1968, but she was best in roles that asked her to suggest some darkness beneath the sunniness of her looks, and here she reveals a depth and complexity many of her pin-up contemporaries could never match. The way their relationship stumbles and finally fades away as they both lie to themselves, and the final shot of Petulia's face as she speaks Archie's name, are full of sadness and regret. While certain aspects of the film possibly do initially seem dated, they also suggest that the film captures the time and place it records with a commendable precison and authenticity, and the emotional impact of the story and performances combine to render such criticisms irrelevant.