At The Back

Now You See Me

2013-06-18T00:08:00.001+01:00

For weeks, the cinema chain I pay my £14.99 to each month for unlimited movies has been teasing its clientele with the promise of a Secret Unlimited Screening. This one off, top secret screening would be open, free of charge to anyone with an Unlimited Card but the film was to be kept a secret. All we knew was that it would be a 12A Certificate movie and that it was being screened, across the country for one night only at 8:30pm, long ahead of its UK theatrical release. The brilliant marketing behind the scheme insured excitement, anticipation, discussion and a full cinema on a Monday evening for a movie which turned out to be Now You See Me. My initial reaction was one of slight disappointment as I was hoping for something like Pacific Rim which hadn’t been released anywhere else in the world for the selfish reason that a review would drive more traffic to this very page. I’d heard a couple of good things about Now You See Me from the States though so eagerly settled in for the next two hours.

Now you See Me is a heist movie in the vague style of the Oceans movies in that someone (a mastermind whose identity is unknown), draws together a group of experts in their fields to carry out heists on an epic scale. The difference here though is that the individuals chosen aren’t safe crackers, getaway drivers, contortionists or Matt Damon but are magicians. Their heists will involve magic and illusion to steal from banks and companies chosen by their puppet master. On the trail of the magicians is FBI agent Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) who is teamed, much to his disliking, with Interpol agent Alma Dray (Melanie Laurent). Together the pair chases magicians Daniel (Jesse Eisenberg), Merritt (Woody Harrelson), Henly (Isla Fisher) & Jack (Dave Franco) across the United States from show to show, always remaining two steps behind their cunning and trickery.

The movie has a light hearted, comedic tone which draws the audience in while surreptitiously delivering a lesson about the world’s recent financial turmoil. It soon becomes clear that the magicians are out to take from those who have and give to those without and their Robin Hood style of magic brings them attention from huge adoring audiences, the media and of course the law. I enjoyed the magic and had fun trying to work out how tricks were done but felt a little bamboozled by areas of the plot. For a start, the foursome doesn’t know who they are working for and why and I instantly found this strange. Would they really be doing what they are doing for someone they don’t know and for reasons they cannot fathom? Occasionally the development is a little clunky but this is often masked by a slight of hand in the form of the dialogue. While the plot has a couple of holes, the dialogue is as sharp as a magicians saw. It’s witty, clever and often very funny.

The cast work well together and the actors appear to be having a lot of fun. Of the four magician leads, it’s Harrelson and Eisenberg who stand out. Whether due to character, acting or something else, they draw the viewer’s eye more than Fisher and Franco and rekindle a tremendous screen double act that was first seen in Zombieland. Woody Harrelson is cool, no matter what role he plays and Eisenberg seems to have be playing an adult for the first time in this movie. The two are also the funniest of the main actors though Franco and Fisher provide their own attractions. Dave Franco has appeared in several movies of late in forgettable, side roles but here he is more front and centre and equips himself well. Isla Fisher seems to have less to do than the other characters but is very watchable. Mark Ruffalo is great as the bemused and increasingly agitated FBI agent. He plays his role very well and is a lot of fun to watch. I’m always happy to see and especially hear Melanie Laurent in a film and she is good here but through no fault of her own, her character felt unnecessary. It was obvious within seconds of her appearance that she would develop as a love interest and this felt forced at every turn. I understand that Ruffalo’s character needed a partner to bounce off but why go down the same old route of initial distrust followed by romance? It’s a tired cliché.

Being a film about magic and magicians, the film doesn’t always show its hand but the magical parallels run deep. The movie is like one big magic trick in the sense that it keeps drawing your attention in one direction while performing the trick in the other. I guessed a lot of the ‘tricks’ but was really annoyed that I didn’t get the big closing number. All the way through, the film kept saying that magicians get you to look the other way and I fell for it. I was initially annoyed that I got so many of the smaller twists but in a way I think that the film might have been making these easy, much like a magician, to lure you in and hide what was really happening. To take the analogy further though, I also feel that like a magic trick, when things slow down, you can see cracks in the façade and sometimes it feels like the cards are dropped, leaving a mess all over the floor. On the whole, I think the plot worked but it was kept tied together with the thinnest of pocket handkerchiefs.

Something which didn’t work for me was the cinematography. I thought that this was messy and too busy and while working to distract the viewer, also made some scenes unwatchable. I have a problem with focusing on certain scenes in action movies, the ones which feature a cut every half a second where you can’t tell what’s going on. I felt the same about sections of this movie. There were times when the cutting was too rapid and the framing too juddery that I just couldn’t focus and there was no need for this. A good magician will hold his hand steady while performing a trick. If he’s shaking his arm all over the place then you know something is array. Another problem I had was with the score. This, more than anything else in the movie, reminded me of the TV show Hustle. I used to love the conman TV series in which a group of highly skilled con artists, robbed from the rich and undeserving while running circles around the police in a funny way in stylish locations while their moral compass always guided them home. Wait, hang on. At times the movie feels like Hustle the Movie and while this isn’t terrible, it’s been done and done well. A further problem was with the car chase which felt totally unrealistic and unnecessary though was obviously inserted for a reason. I just feel as though that reason could have been dealt with in a calmer, more realistic manner, more suited to the general tone of the movie. As always, I also had a problem with the product placement which occurred several times in the early stages.

Overall Now You See Me is a decent heist thriller. There are some very good comedy moments and the performances are good but it rushes around, afraid to slow down in case the audience spot the ace hidden up its sleeve. Half the fun of the film is trying to work it out and in this regard it manages to both surprise and let the audience guess a little for themselves, ultimately satisfying both of its audience’s desires.

6/10

GFR 9/10

Six of the Best... Most Beautiful Actresses

2013-06-16T10:30:00.000+01:00

Seven weeks. That's all it took for this feature to get onto the topic of sexy ladies. If I'm honest, I'm surprised that I managed to hold out for as long as I did. This week's topic has been the most fun to research but the most difficult to decide on so far. Even up to a couple of minutes before I started writing there was a last minute change (sorry Oona) and I've decided to break the rules slightly because of my indecisiveness/perviness. Instead of the usual six I've chosen twelve and in a vain attempt to quantify the decision besides greediness, I've decided to feature six current and six former actresses. I brand myself on reviewing one hundred years of film so it would only be right. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. For fear of losing my female readers who may think (rightly) that I'm just using this feature as an excuse to look at pretty ladies, next week's list will redress the balance and feature Six of the Best... Actors my Girlfriend Wishes I Was. Her six currently also stands at twelve and there are lots of 'ooh' 'ahh' and 'yummy' noises coming from her direction whenever I bring up the topic. So make sure you come back next week for the actors but now, here are Six (Twelve) of the Best... Most Beautiful Actresses, beginning with those still working.

Clockwise

Scarlett Johansson. Born New York, USA 1984. Known from Lost in Translation, Vicky Christina Barcelona, The Avengers.
Freida Pinto. Born Mumbai, India 1984. Known from Slumdog Millionaire, Trishna, Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
Megan Fox. Born Oak Ridge, USA 1986. Known from Transformers, Jennifer's Body, Friends with Kids.
Mila Kunis. Born Chernivtsi, Ukraine 1983. Known from Black Swan, Ted, Oz the Great and Powerful.
Penelope Cruz. Born Madrid, Spain 1984. Known from Volver, Vicky Christina Barcelona, Nine.
Zooey Deschanel. Born Los Angeles, USA 1980. Known from Elf, Yes Man, (500) Days of Summer.

Clockwise

Marilyn Munroe. Born Los Angeles, USA 1926. Known from Some Like it Hot, The Seven Year Itch, How to Marry a Millionaire.
Sophia Loren. Born Rome, Italy 1934. Known from Houseboat, El Cid, A Special Day.
Grace Kelly. Born Philadelphia, USA 1929. Known from Mogambo, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window.
Elizabeth Taylor. Born London, England 1932. Known from Cleopatra, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, BUtterfield 8.
Carole Lombard. Born Fort Wayne, USA 1908. Known from My Man Godfrey, Nothing Sacred, Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
Hedy Lamarr. Born Vienna, Austria 1913. Known from Ecstasy, Boom Town, Ziegfeld Girl.

Man of Steel

2013-06-15T22:23:00.001+01:00

Eight years ago, Christopher Nolan reinvented a seemingly dead superhero franchise with his Dark Knight trilogy. Here he’s acting as a producer to attempt the same with another DC comic book hero and perhaps the most famous of all, Superman. There have been Superman films in the past of course and it’s only seven years since the forgettable Superman Returns hit screens to a decent critical and lukewarm box office reception. Taking control of Man of Steel is director Zack Snyder, a man a distinct style and experience of large, special effects movies. I’ve never had much affinity for the Superman character although I enjoyed the 90s TV series. The character, coupled with a director whose films I rarely enjoy lead me to having low expectations for the latest in a long line of superhero based blockbusters. Unfortunately even my low expectations failed to be met with Man of Steel, a dull movie which lasts for an age and goes nowhere.

The film does what all superhero re-boots are doing this century and gives us the origin story. The problem with Superman’s origin story is that it’s long and complex, or at least it is in this film. Spider-Man gets bitten by a spider, develops heightened senses and web stuff then goes with it. Batman invents stuff and goes from man to superhero. Superman though has a story which involves the end of a world, a race’s battle for survival, civil war, unusual childhood development and alienation before self discovery. That’s a lot to put in one movie and of course the movie doesn’t want to just give us the origin, it wants to entertain us with a villain and large scale battle. This results in a two and a half hour film which is full of long, unnecessary exposition and long winded flash backs.

I expect most people will be aware of the Superman origins story so why this movie feels the need to go into it in such depth is beyond me. The early scenes on Krypton bored me rotten but at least the world is well designed. It was an interesting development to see Clark Kent struggle to come to terms with who he is, drifting from town to town, never fitting in. This is slightly more realistic than Smallville to Metropolis to journalist. While not disastrous, these early scenes failed to have me enthralled and I felt a little like the fidgety young child sat next to me. The film attempts to cram in a lot of Christian symbolism and views the Superman character as a Christ like figure. This is fair enough as after all he’s a being come down from the skies who is capable of magical things. And he’s made up. The problem is though that the film isn’t at all subtle with this idea. There might as well be a claxon sounding each time the character appears Christ like. In one scene, Kent is discussing sacrificing himself for the good of humanity whilst he’s sat in front of a giant stained glass portrait of Jesus. In another scene he actually falls from a space ship in the crucifixion pose and late on there is an image where he is seemingly ascending to heaven. It’s all so in your face.

The final forty or fifty minutes contain several large scale, CGI heavy battles. I felt the same about these as I did in Iron Man 3. It’s just not exciting anymore. It’s all been done before and there was little originality in it. First Smallville is half destroyed and then the fight turns to Metropolis where the action improves slightly before becoming another full scale, city destroying battle. The Avengers did this last year to good effect but now it seems as though every blockbuster movie feels the need to end with a prolonged section in which half a city is destroyed. It’s so overdone that it loses its excitement and the entire genre is ending up looking the same. Speaking of looks, Man of Steel is a very good looking film. Zack Snyder has a unique style which is instantly recognisable and while I personally don’t love it, it does look good. The CGI is mostly excellent which considering how much there is, is something of a success. There was a scene of a large building collapsing which looked superb and some of the stuff in the air looks great too. A problem I had with the look of the film is Snyder’s overuse of a particular type of shot. It’s a shot which is very ‘now’ and features in a lot of big movies at the moment but Snyder seems to put it in almost every scene. The shot is always a wide angle CGI shot which has a little bit of shake or movement in it. The camera then zooms very quickly and deeply onto the focal point and again does a slight shake. It’s an attractive looking shot but it’s over done here. I saw the film in 3D and I’m happy to report that I completely forgot I was watching it in 3D. On the plus side this means that it didn’t distract me but I didn’t actually notice anything being in 3D either.

The score is efficient for its purpose and was instantly recognisable as being composed by Hans Zimmer. Like the director, he has a unique style which I spotted despite not knowing that he’d worked on the movie. There are problems in the acting department though. Newcomer Henry Cavill plays the Last Son of Krypton and his performance is uninspiring. Some of the problem might lie with the character but Cavill is wooden, lacks passion or emotion and didn’t have the screen presence to carry the character. He’s also ridiculously good looking which probably helps but annoyed me! Amy Adams is usually a steady pair of hands and she’s fine but unspectacular here. She’s always watchable but I’ve seen her do far better work. The same can be said of Michael Shannon who plays villain Zod. Shannon is one of my favourite current actors and has a natural malice and anger. For some reason he seems to lack some of that intense anger here though and is much more restrained than usual, despite playing a comic book villain. He feels flatter than he has been of late but comes alive a little more late on.

Because I wasn’t enjoying the movie, I picked up on things which I might have otherwise missed. A little thing that bugged me was how Clark Kent managed to have a shave on a 20,000 year old space ship and I couldn’t help but wonder where he kept the codex in his suit. Something which I couldn’t miss was the product placement. I haven’t seen such a blatant product placement in a movie for a long time. There are cringe worthy shots of cameras, phones and shops, all with their logos front and centre. The movie made an incredible $160 million from product placement before it even hit cinemas and I find this to be a huge insult to the audience. Not only does it get in the way of enjoying the movie but it means that the director is making it with the advertisers in mind, rather than the audience. The massive cash injection from this advertising means that the film’s production cost in real terms was just $65 million.

Man of Steel is a very long film and it feels longer due to having several endings. On at least four occasions I thought that the film had ended only to have another scene and then another. It’s almost like the film doesn’t know how to end and wants to cover all the bases just in case, but it just ends up feeling weak. The multiple endings come after half a city is destroyed, an act that no one seems particularly bothered about. There’s a severe lack of empathy in this film. Overall Man of Steel is a movie which looks good but has an overly long, overly explained and overly dull story which is averagely acted to a backdrop of seen-it-before explosions and Nokia adverts.

5/10

GFR 4/10

Titbits

Ben Affleck was considered to direct but turned the job down due to his lack of experience in the genre.
Although Superman's arch nemesis isn't featured, he gets a blink and you'll miss it visual mention.
Henry Cavill won the role ahead of the likes of Armie Hammer, Joe Manganiello, Zac Efron and Matt Bomer.

Nine

2013-06-15T10:32:00.003+01:00

Nine is a 2009 movie adaptation of a Broadway musical of the same name which was in turn inspired by Federico Fellini’s semi-autobiographical film, 8½. Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a gifted film maker on the cusp of his fiftieth birthday. Struggling for ideas on the back of a series of flops, he flees to a remote health spa and turns to the women in his life for inspiration. The movie is notable for containing several fleeting performances from some of the most beautiful and talented women in Hollywood as well as Kate Hudson. Although poorly received by critics and a certified box office failure, the movie garnered four Academy Award nominations and in my opinion contains some superb cinematography as well as a couple of great performances.

The main problem with the movie for me is that it isn’t 8½. There are a few scenes, especially those featuring Day-Lewis and Penelope Cruz, which look like shot for shot recreations of Fellini’s masterpiece and these bought back happy memories of watching that movie. During a lot of the other scenes I just wished that I was watching Fellini’s film. The problem with making a movie based on such a well respected source is that you’ve got to make it pretty special to make people want to watch yours instead of the film you’re basing your work on. In the case of Nine, it just made me remember how good 8½ is.

The movie captures a lot of the writer’s block and marital turmoil of the source film and if anything the frustrations and fears of the central character are made a little more obvious. The ideas and themes get across well and it’s a much more simplified version of Fellini’s story. This though is a musical version and there are very few musicals which I enjoy. For me the songs have to be well placed and well written and here they often didn’t feel well placed. A few of the songs had decent lyrics and a couple of the actresses sung well but the musical numbers just felt squeezed in and out of place. The dialogue around them was generally quite strong though. The conversations between Guido and his wife and mistress were deep and meaningful as well as entertaining but unfortunately again they just reminded me of Fellini’s film.

There were two reasons behind my decision to watch Nine. The first was that I wanted to see a musical inspired by a great movie and the second was because a friend recently remarked about the sheer number of beautiful women in the movie. He was right. The film is a treat for the eyes as the likes of Penelope Cruz and Marion Cotillard strut around a stage in provocative attire but beyond the seedier visuals, the film contains a lot of beauty. It would be very difficult to make Italy look ugly and Italy in the early 1960s might just be one of the most beautiful places in modern history. The movie captures the essence of the style of the period and the little sports cars, sharp suits, perfect hair and beautiful architecture are all shot in a skilful manner which combines modern and classical techniques. Some of the most alluring footage is that shot in the style of 8½, the high contrast, crisp black and white perfectly matching the stunning costumes and locations.

It should go without saying that Daniel Day-Lewis puts in a good performance. That’s like saying the sky is blue or American’s like cheese but it should still be mentioned. I liked his accent and tone of voice as well as quiet, understated mannerisms which contrasted with the bright and vivacious women by which he was surrounded. Penelope Cruz puts in a superb performance which earned her an Oscar nomination. Like the other female characters, she’s only on screen for a very short time but her scenes are the most memorable. Like Cruz, Marion Cotillard is also excellent. Judi Dench appears to have more screen time than the other actresses (but actually doesn't) and acts as a sort of guardian and guide to the beleaguered director. She too is great. Nicole Kidman does that sort of light and airy, floaty thing that she does and is well cast as the inpatient movie star. Coming off less well are Sophia Loren and Fergie who are given little to do but still suffer behind the other actresses. Loren’s static face looks emotionless even next to Nicole Kidman’s and Fergie seems to think she’s still in a pop video. Kate Hudson gives one of the best performances I’ve seen her give but that’s a bit like saying “This is the least smelly dog poo I’ve stepped in”. You still have shit on your shoe.

Overall Nine is a film that has its moments but suffers largely because of where it comes from. Perhaps if you haven’t seen Fellini’s 8½ then the film will be more enjoyable but if that’s the case, try to imagine drinking one of those cheap cola drinks. It might be based on Coke but it isn’t the real think. The movie looks good and there are some great performances to be found but I wasn’t enamoured by the music and couldn’t separate it from its source.

5/10

Titbits

Kate Hudson's character wasn't featured in the Broadway production and was written especially for the film with Huson in mind. Honestly.
The performance lengths of all seven of the supporting actresses are:

Marion Cotillard: 17 Minutes & 16 Seconds
Penelope Cruz: 12 Minutes & 26 Seconds
Judi Dench: 11 Minutes & 28 Seconds
Nicole Kidman: 10 Minutes & 16 Seconds
Kate Hudson: 8 Minutes & 41 Seconds
Fergie: 7 Minutes & 39 Seconds
Sophia Loren: 4 Minutes & 11 Seconds

An array of actresses including Demi Moore, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Katie Holmes, Renee Zellweger, Anne Hathaway, Sienna Miller, Amy Adams, Gwyneth Paltrow and Barbara Striesland either auditioned or were considered for roles. George Clooney, Johnny Depp and Antonio Banderas were also considered for the part of Guido.

Internal Affairs

2013-06-14T22:19:00.002+01:00

Driven by a twisting, well fleshed out script and some very well honed performances, 1990’s Internal Affairs is a police crime-thriller about the investigations into corruption in a Los Angeles police precinct. Ambitious and well liked cop Raymond Avila (Andy Garcia) joins the department’s Internal Affairs Division where his first assignment is to investigate a former colleague (William Baldwin) who is linked to a possible evidence plant. His initial investigations hint at something more sinister going on in the department and his attention is soon diverted towards respected cop and attentive family man Dennis Peck (Richard Gere).

This movie was recently recommended to me and I can understand its appeal. The script is tight and well written and I was kept on tender hooks by the various twists and reveals. The story goes down avenues you don’t expect from the setup and the characters are wonderfully created and performed. Richard Gere’s Dennis Peck in particular turns into something I haven’t seen the actor become before. I’ve always had a bit of a problem with Gere as I’ve often found him to be too clean cut and weedy. Here he is anything but, playing a vicious, womanising, near psychopath who builds and builds in a creepy and quite way as the film progresses. Andy Garcia’s Raymond Avila is tormented by his prey and the interactions and bust ups between the two are some of the highlights of the film.

Early on I suspected that the LAPD corruption story was going to be linked to the film’s release period, the early 90s being quite obviously a difficult time for the department. The ideas of planting evidence and beating up witnesses soon disappear though and the film becomes something very different. What I liked was that the movie kept me on my toes. I was rarely able to second guess it and you’re never quite sure when or how people are going to get their comeuppance. The gradual breakdown of Andy Garcia’s character is excellently handled and it seems to both come out of nowhere but also build slowly in the background. His anguished performance also keeps the film on a knife edge. Both leads are excellent but it was Richard Gere who really surprised me. His malice and lack of respect for the social order was spectacular. His charm added to his edgy performance as he seemed capable of dropping the underwear of any female character.

One of the problems with the movie is how quickly it’s aged but I can’t really fault the film for looking dated because it’s nearly a quarter of a century old. It would be wrong to comment too heavily on the hair and costumes but I will say that very few eras have aged quite so badly fashion wise as the late 80s and early 90s. The aging I’m thinking about though is with regards to the technical aspects of the movie. The score is crude and very much of its time while the cinematography features periods of slow motion in action and sex scenes which you only ever see in films from the period. I quite liked the imagined flashbacks, filmed under harsh blue lighting but there was little of else of the film’s look that I enjoyed. Even the set dressing felt clunky and drab. Luckily the film is saved by the performances and script which is what elevates it above mundane and towards something half decent.

6/10

Titbits

It has been reported that leads Garcia and Gere didn't get on and that some of the scenes in which they scrap were a little more real than the director intended. Garcia subsequently refused to attend the wrap party.
The movie features an early appearance from a very young Elijah Wood.

The Gold Rush

2013-06-14T08:43:00.002+01:00

Imagine being a big fan of The Beatles who doesn’t like Hey Jude or a car enthusiast that isn’t keen on Ferraris. That’s the situation I find myself in when it comes to The Gold Rush. I’ve never met as big a Charlie Chaplin fan as myself and doubt I ever will. His 1925 film saw the beginning of his golden period, a period which lasted fifteen years before his deportation from the US and witnessed the production of some of his most successful films. Chaplin remarked in his own splendid autobiography that he wanted The Gold Rush to be the film that he was remembered for and to an extent it is. Why is it then that I don’t love his Ferrari, his Hey Jude, his Gold Rush? The Gold Rush was amongst the first Chaplin films I saw and I had high hopes for it. When I was initially discovering Chaplin’s work it was obvious that this was one of his most famous and as a result, surely one of his best. Many people would argue that it is. I was instantly disappointed though with a film that I felt was short of laughter and featuring a plot which I cared little for. The story certainly beats some of his earlier shorts and it’s better written and deeper than say his follow-up The Circus but it doesn’t really do anything for me. It feels like the plot of a short that has been stretched to breaking point and isn’t as sweet, dramatic or sophisticated as the likes of The Kid or City Lights.

I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t like The Gold Rush because I do but I’m at a loss to understand its appeal against films which I think are more rounded in terms of theme, comedy and style. I assumed after my first watch a few years ago that I must have missed something but a recent re-watch left me with the same opinion. The plot finds Chaplin in his ubiquitous guise of The Tramp and on his way to the Yukon to make his millions as a gold prospector. The Tramp being The Tramp doesn’t immediately strike gold and finds himself ill prepared for the harsh conditions of the cold mountains. Bad weather strands him in a remote and rickety cabin with two others, the escaped fugitive Black Larsen (Tom Murray) and Big Jim McKay (Mack Swain), a man who has found a large deposit of gold but is forced to abandon it due to the weather.

My overarching problem with The Gold Rush is that I find it dull. Chaplin was usually so good at keeping his audience entertained, whether it be through a sight gag, plot development or other ‘comic business’, that it’s shocking to see such long periods in The Gold Rush where nothing much happens. Even when messing around with inanimate objects, something which he is usually so good at, I found myself uninterested. I wish I liked the film more as this is Chaplin’s only feature that I’ve seen to date which I don’t love but I just can’t fall for this movie in the same way that I have his others. I don’t want to be too down on the film though because my only real problem with it is that it doesn’t excite me like some of his other work. This being a Charlie Chaplin film, there is still much to love.

I believe that the movie comes from a good place. Chaplin got the idea of The Tramp as a gold prospector after seeing a photo of a long line of men trudging up a mountainside in search of their fortune. Many of the men pictured were to die on the mountain in heavy storms and the trip was worthwhile for very few of them. The image is something which spoke to Chaplin and stayed with him. Chaplin recreates the photograph in his establishing shot and early ambitious scenes which features over 600 extras. Far from the crowds of the mountain is a lone prospector, The Tramp. A decent early laugh is to be had on a tight mountain path which The Tramp is traversing with some difficulty. While walking across the thin, icy path he is suddenly joined by a bear. The bear follows him for a few moments, both seemingly oblivious to the other before a well timed turn from the human occurs just as the bear disappears down a different route.

Many of the comedic highlights take place when Chaplin is holed up in the cabin. One of the most famous images of Chaplin’s entire career can be found inside the walls of the remote shack. The scene in question is the ‘Tramp eats his shoe’ scene. Hemmed in by a wall of snow, the two men inside the cabin are running low on food and in a desperate attempt to find sustenance, decide to eat The Tramp’s right shoe. After boiling the leather until supple enough to chew, Chaplin wipes a speck of dirt off his plate before landing a shoe on it. The idea of wiping the plate before placing the shoe on it is something that I missed on my first watch but it’s a fantastic gag. The shoe was in fact made of liquorish in order to make it edible but both actors do a good job of making the meal look as disgusting as it sounds. Chaplin’s use of the laces as spaghetti is a great added touch. The cabin is also home to some of the film’s stand out technical and stunt work. A particularly impressive in-camera trick was to turn Chaplin into the giant chicken and the movement of the set when battered by the storm is also very well done. In addition to this, I thought that the puppet version of The Tramp captured the likeness of the character remarkably well when flung from a miniature.

Another highlight of the film and arguably Chaplin’s career was ‘the roll dance’. This sequence will probably be recognisable to most people, whether they’ve seen a Chaplin film or not and it’s a magnificent scene. In it, Chaplin attempts to impress his guests with an impromptu tap dance. Instead of using his legs though, he takes two bread rolls, two forks and creates a magnificent dance routine for the camera. He makes use of his head to create the effect that the ‘legs’ are indeed his own and although I’ve seen the idea done before, it has never been bettered. The roll dance was actually first seen on screen in 1917’s The Rough House in which Chaplin’s friend and early collaborator Roscoe Arbuckle performed the dance but although not originally his, it has become Charlie’s. Something which was borrowed by a friend was a scene in which he is followed around the cabin by a gun. While two characters grapple for control of the rifle, The Tramp ducks and dives around the room, finding that the barrel ends up pointing in his direction no matter which way he turns. This idea was also used in Buster Keaton’s The General to fantastic effect.

The second half of the movie takes place in a well constructed town set. The set used 250,000 feet of timber and was somewhat of a tourist attraction, featuring thick fake snow in the baking California sun. The sets look great but once again the story here does little for me. Back from the wilderness and penniless, The Tramp becomes infatuated with a local saloon girl (Georgia Hale) and attempts to win her over. These scenes are slightly more dramatic and pathos filled than the earlier mountain scenes but they fail to match the romance of City Lights or even Modern Times. They even feel like a step backwards from TheKid, one of Chaplin’s greatest romances, albeit a platonic, paternal romance. Georgia Hale was a replacement casting after Chaplin’s first actress (and wife) Lita Grey became pregnant with the couple’s son. Hale is very good in her scenes and I didn’t miss Edna Purviance who was absent from her first Chaplin film in years. The problem is that I just couldn’t get into the story.

Overall The Gold Rush is an ambitious and generally successful movie. It isn’t as continuously funny or interesting as the movies which sandwich it but it features some of Charlie Chaplin’s most iconic moments and for that I must give it credit. I still don’t see it as his masterpiece and certainly wouldn’t recommend it to a Chaplin first timer but it’s also far from his worst.

7/10

Titbits

The film was re-released in 1942 with a new score and a narration which were composed and recorded Chaplin himself.
The dancing rolls scene was so popular that in some theatres, projectionists reversed the film to play it again.
At the time of filming, Chaplin and co-star Georgia Hale were having an affair, despite Chaplin's first actress, and wife, being at home with their newborn son.

Taxi Driver

2013-06-12T23:15:00.000+01:00

When I started writing about cinema almost eighteen months ago, there was one film above all others which I was nervous to write about. A year and a half, over five hundred reviews and approximately 470,000 words later, the same film was still looming large over me. That film was Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, my favourite of all time. The unease came from two perspectives. On the one hand I didn’t feel as though my writing, limited in experience and knowledge as I am, could do it justice while I was also conscious about penning a review which ran for thousands of words and which no one would have the interest or time to read. It wasn’t until earlier this week when a friend said with some surprise that he couldn’t find Taxi Driver on my A-Z that I thought that time to review it had come. So with the added expectation of an audience waiting, I sat down to watch my favourite film once again.

Within ten seconds of the film starting, a bright, broad smile shone across my face. The entire film came back to me within the first few frames and I began to think ahead to the magnificent scenes which were to follow over the coming hour and fifty minutes. My excitement grew as the quickening snare and saxophone of Bernard Hermann’s score rose to meet the opening shot of a New York taxi appearing from behind a column of steam. The movie creates an off-kilter sensation within these first few seconds and it’s a feeling which continues to ride throughout the movie. The opening titles are a deep shade of blood red and forebode the bloodshed to come. The closeness of the taxi as it brushes past the static camera also creates a sense of excitement and danger and the jumping; out of focus lights as seen from inside the taxi make the viewer try in vain to pinpoint something recognisable. The eye darts across the screen in search of an image to grasp but is left wanting. Wanting that is until Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) walks out of the steam and into a taxi office.

Travis Bickle doesn’t give much away in his opening encounters with the office employee. He’s a man who has trouble sleeping and is looking for a job as a way of filling his sleepless nights. Although Bickle himself doesn’t come across as anything special in this early scene, Martin Scorsese continues the unsettling feeling with his camera work. There is an argument in the back of shot between two drivers, something which distracts the viewer’s and Bickle’s eye. These eyes are of course, one and the same as the entire movie is filmed from Bickle’s perspective. We the viewer are literally inside his head, witnessing what he witnesses. The off-camber feeling is further exemplified in this opening exchange through the positioning of a dispatcher who is sat behind Bickle. He is much too high and this creates an awkward, claustrophobic feeling to the scene. Once Travis has his orders he leaves the office and ventures into the garage where he can survey his world. Here Scorsese does something interesting with his camera once more. As Bickle exits camera right, the camera itself pans left, surveying the taxi driver’s new world. It continues to pan about three hundred degrees until it again finds Bickle, still looking at his new world.

As Travis Bickle we see the only the grime and filth of city of New York. Bickle writes in his diary about his hopes for a rain to come and wash all the filth into the sewer and it is indeed a dirty city. The thing is of course that even in the 1970s, New York had its beauty. Bickle is predisposed to searching for the dirt and grunge the city throws up and as a result he actively goes out in search of it. He admits to being one of the few drivers who’ll work “anytime, anywhere”, including the down and out areas of the city to which few other drivers will venture. Through his eyes we see the darkest reaches of the soot covered, trash littered city, teaming with pimps, pushers and prostitutes, the very people who Bickle despises and the very people he picks up in his taxi. To me New York City is the greatest city on the planet. I’ve done my fair share of travelling and have never been to a city like it. Its vibrancy, the noise, the dirt, all of it excites me. New York is an assault on the senses but to Travis Bickle, it has a somewhat more pungent bouquet. There’s no doubting that the city has changed in the last forty years. When I was in Times Square a couple of months ago I saw in the wake of drug peddlers and porn cinemas, tourists, sailors and a naked cowboy. The city has been sanitised and Bickle’s dream of washing all the dirt away has in fact, on the surface at least, come to fruition.

Despite his residence in a bustling metropolis, Travis Bickle is a lonely man. He is cocooned in his metallic, metered shell and his human interaction is stunted and awkward. On the few occasions when he attempts to take part in conversations he opens himself up as being socially inept, unsure of what is acceptable and often shows no interest in the opinions or concerns of others. He comes across as both forceful but distant. An example of this distance comes when he is talking with some fellow drivers at an all night cafe. He struggles to interact and show interest in the conversation but becomes taken with his drink, bubbling away with an alka-seltzer tablet fizzing at the foot of the glass. Bickle has no difficulty in focussing but it is what he focuses on which is cause for concern. His social awkwardness comes across later on his second date with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd). After an initial infatuation, he persuades the light and airy campaign worker to meet him for a date and like his introduction to the movie, shows no signs of the darkness that simmers close to the surface. On the second date though, he takes her to a porn theatre. This decision not only shows his lack of ability to recognise the social norms and his inability to tune into the feelings of others but also to his own self destruction. He is a man who is on a path to destruction and appears to sabotage his own happiness. In a later scene, a scene which marks a significant turning point it should be mentioned; Bickle is alone in his apartment, watching television. The television by this point is the only thing in Bickle’s life capable of distracting him from himself. Travis has his foot on the TV and slowly rocks it backwards and forwards, teasing it, seeing how far he can push the action and get away with it. After a few seconds the TV falls and smashes, breaking his last connection to the real world and his only ‘normal’ home comfort.

Travis’ attempts to clean up New York appear via his endeavours to dispose of the father figures of two of the city’s daughters. As the film progresses towards its messy conclusion, the central character becomes more and more dishevelled. His actions become more spontaneous and unpredictable and his outward appearance matches his interior, becoming noticeably more sweaty and with bags under his eyes. The Betsy character is introduced to the dark movie almost as an angel. Her flowing white dress and pearl white smile is captured in slow motion as she enters the movie for the first time. This is of course how Bickle sees her and it is his wish to save her from the hell in which he believes she finds herself. When it becomes clear that she doesn’t want saving and his attempts fail, he moves onto a more obvious victim of the devilish city, the underage prostitute Iris (Jody Foster). Iris displays a street-smart and adult sensibility which is far beyond her years but to Bickle, is a girl trapped by the dirty claws of the city. He takes it upon himself to be the one to free her from its grasp and return her to normality, something which he himself doesn’t experience. His interactions with Iris capture Travis at his most normal and most honest. His attempts to save her appear honest and his intentions are true. These intentions though eventually manifest in turning the anti-hero into a murderer.

The character’s unease and paranoia eventually lead him to arm himself. Rather than carrying a single gun or a knife like some of the other drivers, Bickle buys an arsenal of guns which he straps to himself and admires in the film’s most iconic scene. The “Are you talkin’ to me?” scene was originally written as “Travis talks to himself in the mirror” in the script but fleshed out by De Niro to produce one of the most famous scenes in movie history. Fame aside, it captures the character following a change. Still lonely and alienated, he now feels powerful and brave. His puffed out chest and arrogant expression mark a noticeable alteration in his character and start him down the path towards the film’s climax. It’s shortly after this scene that another change in the character is first revealed. This change is more striking and is revealed wonderfully by the director. At a rally for Presidential nominee Charles Palatine, the camera tracks across the crowd at waist level before stopping at a familiar looking jacket; Travis Bickle’s jacket. Bickle’s hands fumble in his pockets and he takes out a bottle of pills. Having taken one in his hand, he quickly brings it up to his face as the camera follows sharply. It is then revealed that his hair has been shaved into a drastically ominous Mohawk. The cleverness and surprise behind this reveal is as effective as the haircut itself and is further proof of the character’s spiral towards something big and something bloody.

The film’s ending is an incredible barrage of sound, colour and movement, hemmed into a claustrophobic space. Bickle takes it upon himself to save Iris and becomes a one man army, assaulting the tenement building which is home to a brothel. The scene was unfortunately de-saturated in post production in order to get past the censors and as a result the colours don’t quite look right. Despite this the sequence is still full of impact and the rampage is quick, realistic and exciting. It’s obvious from the outset that this is a kamikaze mission and the resignation in the character’s face when it doesn’t turn out as he planned is obvious. The scene features some clever special effects which look good for the era and budget and De Niro’s performance is magnificent. The scene ends with a beautiful tracking shot from the ceiling, detailing the destruction that has come before it. The shot from above is something that is repeated several times in the film and is often associated with desks. Whenever a desk is in shot, Scorsese turns the mundane into something interesting with the use of the top-down tracking shot. In the final scene he reverses this as if to suggest the carnage below is somehow mundane in the same way as the paperwork from earlier scenes. This comment on and normality of violence is something which would present itself in many of Scorsese’s later films. The newspaper clippings on the wall of the very final shot also speak to the media’s fascination with the macabre and their celebritising of criminality, a trend which has only quickened in the years since the film’s release.

Throughout the movie Scorsese surprises the audience with beautiful shots. He is able to differentiate between Travis’ world and Betsy’s through the use of lighting and the editing was ahead of its time. His influence on the film cannot be ignored, despite occasionally playing bridesmaid to the double-brided wedding of Paul Schrader’s script and Robert De Niro’s performance. One of my favourite shots in the entire movie takes place in a corridor when Travis is on the phone to Betsy. As he pleads for another chance with his angel incarnate, the camera tracks to the left, leaving the conversation and focussing down the empty corridor towards the street. To me this personifies Betsy’s leaving of the relationship and also shows where Bickle is heading – outside, alone again. Aside from the subtext though, it’s a beautiful and bold shot which creates a sense of anticipation as you aren’t sure why the director has done it to begin with. You are meant to expect something to be coming down the corridor but in the end are left with Travis leaving. It’s so simple but at the same time so clever. To compliment Scorsese’s visuals, Bernard Herrmann provided his final score. Although Taxi Driver contains the cinematic behemoths of Scorsese and De Niro, it could be argued that neither have contributed as much to cinema as Herrmann. His score for Psycho is instantly recognisable and his work on Vertigo has rarely been surpassed. He composed the scores for every Hitchcock film between 1955-64, a period which captured Hitchcock at his height. In addition to this he worked extensively with Orson Welles and composed the score for Citizen Kane. My study of the greatest films ever made finds five Herrmann scored films in the top twenty-five of all time, that’s more than any actor or director. His Taxi Driver score is at the same time beautiful and ominous. Betsy’s theme is one of the most romantic sounding in film history but the thumping drums and long noted brass in other scenes create a sense of violence and dread. It’s an incredible score and one the composer could be proud to finish his career with. Unfortunately Bernard Herrmann died the very same night that he finished working on the movie.

Taxi Driver is famous for many things but one of the most obvious is Robert De Niro’s performance. A friend said yesterday that he considers it the best of all time and you’d be hard pressed to think of any better. De Niro doesn’t play Travis Bickle, he is Travis Bickle. He was spotted by producers Julie and Michael Phillips in Scorsese’s MeanStreets and the couple decided that they wanted the pair for Taxi Driver. De Niro began the movie on the back of his Oscar winning performance as Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II but threw himself into the role with gusto. Having spent time on an American military base in Italy he picked up the non distinct Mid-West accent which he would adopt as Travis Bickle and began working as a cab driver in New York for research. His performance is so intense and believable that he scared his co-stars. Cybill Shepherd has spoken that she found De Niro difficult to work with because he wasn’t Robert De Niro, he was the character and Albert Brooks has stated that the two wouldn’t talk on set because their characters wouldn’t talk in the movie. The attention to detail in the performance is mesmerising and you occasionally forget that you are actually watching an actor, let alone one as recognisable as De Niro. He doesn’t hide behind makeup or excess muscle or fat as in Raging Bull but is on display at all times and yet he is still hidden, hidden inside Travis Bickle.

Aside from the star, the movie is like an acting master class with awe-inspiring performances coming from every quarter. Scorsese regular Harvey Keitel puts in a memorable, natural and deeply researched performance as Iris’ pimp ‘Sport’. Like De Niro, his attention to detail and understanding of the character’s motivation create a mesmerising performance for a character than has only three scenes. Despite his five minutes of screen time, he is more memorable than 95% of movie characters I’ve seen before or since. Jodie Foster was just thirteen when called upon to play the preteen prostitute Iris. Despite her gangly, tom boy looks she creates a believable character and obviously had an adult head on her child’s body. Her ability to play against the likes of Keitel and De Niro should not be overlooked as many of the adult cast were put off by the two method actors. Cybill Shepherd had a difficult role, playing innocence in a film full of guilt. Her reactions to the developments though are spot on. Perhaps it was her natural uncomforted feeling that came through but the look on her face as she gazes at the porn cinema screen is one of the acting highlights in a film full of world-class performances. Even the director gets in on the action with two cameos. His second, a speaking part, was intended for another actor but he had to pull out due to an injury on another film. Scorsese’s dark, troubled performance of a character not unlike Bickle sends chills down the spine. It’s a shame that Scorsese didn’t act more in his younger days.

Though not an actor, the city of New York is most definitely a vital character. Early talk of filming the movie in another city was fought by Scorsese and Schrader who recognised that New York was as much a part of the film as the taxi or as Travis Bickle. Bickle’s New York has an almost otherworldly look to it. Its filth filled streets reminded me of a cinematic post apocalyptic wasteland, the sort of city that could feature in a sci-fi movie about a distant future in which society has been lost. I was reminded a little of Blade Runner in that the city has a dystopian look to it, a never ending, dirt filled, pornographer’s paradise in which anything goes and nothing is policed. Like Ridley Scott’s sci-fi, there is also a noir quality to the movie. It’s hard to imagine that the same city became, just thirty years later, the New York of Will and Grace, Sex and the City and Friends. In a way I wish I’d had a chance to see Bickle’s New York. I love the look of decaying beauty and New York after the decline of industry and before the regeneration of the 1990s had that look. We’re fortunate that it was captured on film by the likes of Scorsese, Allen and Lumet.

As I’ve wittered on for the last 3,000 words I’ve left little more to be said about Taxi Driver. What started as a review has, as I feared, turned into a written lecture and I need to stop before I start thinking of turning my review into a book. For me Taxi Driver is the best film ever made. The script, direction, score, cinematography, acting, lighting, everything are perfect. I cannot think of a single camera angle, nose twitch or music cue that I’d alter and urge anyone and everyone to watch the film. If you’ve seen it, watch it again. If you own it, lend it to a friend who has yet to watch it. Taxi Driver is a high watermark in the careers of Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro and that statement alone should speak to its excellence.

10/10

A Room for Romeo Brass

2013-06-09T14:44:00.001+01:00

A Room for Romeo Brass is a film which reminded me of several things. The strong accents adopted by the characters reminded me of my time in the East Midlands while at University and Shane Meadows’ gritty, personal, social realist style felt like a re-imagined Ken Loach. The film tells the story of two young boys who meet an older man and start hanging around him while he attempts to get one of the boy’s sisters to go out with him. It’s a simple premise but makes for an absorbing plot thanks to a well written and natural script alongside some fine performances.

The film sees the big screen debut of Paddy Considine, an actor who has since worked with Shane Meadows on several occasions and has cemented himself as one of Britain’s most exciting acting talents. Not only has Considine had mainstream success in The Bourne franchise but also directed the multi award winning Tyrannosaur in 2011. Acting alongside the talented Considine is another frequent Meadows collaborator, Andrew Shim, who plays the title role of Romeo. The movie is driven by Considine though, through the early stages of exploratory and slightly comedic development, towards the latter stages in which the character and film become much darker, Considine is a magnetic and welcome presence on the screen.

All of the major characters are expertly written by Meadows and Paul Fraser. The boys speak and act as you’d expect real kids to do and Considine’s Morell is off-beat and entertaining. There’s more than a hint of Alan Partridge in his performance but he also reminded me of motorbike rider and TV presenter Guy Martin. There’s no mistaking that this is ‘a British Picture’ as the characters spend their time kicking about, drinking tea, smoking fags and generally just living. There’s little excitement in their lives, at least not until Morell shows up. Despite the boring lives lead by the characters, I was entranced by their world. It was simple but fascinating. The film makes me understand the appeal of soap operas like Coronation Street a little more than I have done before. The simple plot development and gradual unveiling of Considine’s character lead towards an excellent climax which sees tempers boil and blood spill.

Shane Meadows made A Room for Romeo Brass just a couple of years after his first feature but you’d struggle to spot his lack of experience. The film is thoroughly well made and there are some terrific touches in the camera work which elevate the movie above typical low budget British drama and give it a rich, expensive look. The director learned his craft in over forty short films which were made in the Nottingham area with friends. That alternative to film school seems to have given Meadows the filmmaker’s eye straight off the bat. Considering he is amongst my country’s foremost young directing talents I really should have seen more of his work but unfortunately I’ve only seen a couple of his movies. On the back of this, I will be searching out more.

In addition to great acting and direction, the movie also features a terrific soundtrack. Artists such as Beck, The Specials, Billy Bragg and The Stone Roses whose recent reunion forms the basis of the director’s latest film Made of Stone, all appear and the music works brilliantly with the rest of the film. Overall A Room for Romeo Brass chugs along for a decent ninety minutes. It’s rarely lacklustre and some excellent central performances help it along its way to becoming a solid British kitchen sink drama with a little spice hidden in the back of the cupboard.

7/10

Six of the Best... Films Without Oscars

2013-06-09T10:10:00.000+01:00

For better or for worse, the Academy Awards are at the pinnacle of film recognition in the English speaking world. Since 1927, awards have been handed out to hundreds of movies, many deserving, some less so. If you look down the list of winners you’ll find some of the best films of all time. Citizen Kane, The Godfather and Casablanca all won Oscars, though with just seven between them, perhaps not as many as you’d have expected. Each year there are films which are overlooked by the Academy and this week I’m going to be looking at Six of the Best… Films without Oscars, the films which didn’t receive a single one. In other words, this is a list of films which have one fewer Oscar than How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Pearl Harbor. So here they are; six films without Academy Awards.

1. 12 Angry Men (1957) three nominations.

Should have won – Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing.

2. Reservoir Dogs (1992) no nominations

Should have won – Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Sound Mixing.

3. The Color Purple (1985) eleven nominations

Should have won – Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actress (Whoopie Goldberg), Best Original Score, Best Makeup, Best Costume Design.

4. Psycho (1960) four nominations

Should have won – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Anthony Perkins), Best Film Editing, Best Cinematography Black and White, Best Score.

5. The Great Dictator (1940) five nominations

Should have won – Best Picture, Best Actor (Charlie Chaplin), Best Original Screenplay.

6. Taxi Driver (1976) four nominations

Should have won – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Robert De Niro), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score.

Byzantium

2013-06-08T23:37:00.001+01:00

Neil Jordan’s return to the vampire thriller feels a bit like a yo-yo. It ranges from excellent while held in the hand to incredibly dull while close to the ground but spends a lot of time somewhere in between. To take the analogy a step further, it also contains anticipation but like a yo-yo, you know where the anticipation is going to lead. The film portrays two female vampires who land in a small, run down sea-side town, two centuries after their making. Mother Clara (Gemma Arterton) works mainly as a prostitute to make ends meet while her gloomy daughter Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan) struggles to connect with her mother and is lost and lonely amongst their modern surroundings.

Byzantium is pitched somewhere between gothic thriller and family drama and doesn’t quite succeed at either. At its best it’s a poignant coming of age drama but it’s sometimes painfully slow and meanders between the modern day and early nineteen century when it might have worked better to stay in one or the other. The film is host to a wonderful performance from Saoirse Ronan which helps to elevate it above purely mundane and towards something of interest.

I like the setting for the movie and think it works well as a metaphor for the duo’s existence. The bulk of the plot takes place in an English sea-side town which has seen better days. It’s the sort of place that is stuck in time, a place with a foot in the past but no future. With its heyday long behind it, it exists as a memory of something now lost while slowly decaying, each year losing more and more of what made it what it once was. It’s a town which feels cut off from the rest of the world. The setting also adds a gloomy, washed out look to the picture which then comes alive with flashes of deep colour in the flashback sequences.

I really enjoyed the look and feel of the scenes set in the 1800s. They had a deep gothic, smoky look about them but were alive with dark but vivid colour. These sequences were also the most interesting plot wise too. How, why and when the story began was of more interest to me than how the couple were living in the modern day. That isn’t to say that the scenes set in the present weren’t without their moments because occasionally there were great scenes but I found the earlier ones much more worthy of note. They also tied everything from the modern day together. In comparison to the thriller aspects of the late Georgian scenes, the modern day scenes feature more romance. Eleanor meets a boy whom she begins to confide in and for the first time in two hundred years, she is able to open up to someone and share her experience. I was less interested in Clara’s modern day story of prostitution.

Saoirse Ronan is sublime in the role of the younger vampire. She carries a certain amount of melancholy and feels like a lost maple seed, slowly fluttering towards the ground, hoping to be carried away on the wind to be re-born. There is also compassion in her performance and a lot of loneliness. It’s surely only a matter of time before she takes the step towards major award success. I can think of at least five superb performances she’s given already and she’s still just nineteen. Gemma Arterton is solid but suffers next to Ronan who takes the majority of the limelight. She manages to be both seductive and dangerous though in an almost femme fetale type of role. She also conveys motherly love well. The supporting cast includes Sam Riley, Jonny Lee Miller, Tom Hollander and Caleb Landry Jones, all of whom are good with Hollander and especially Landy Jones standing out.

Byzantium is a film that looks fantastic. The differences between operatic gothic style and decaying beauty are striking but contrast well and the movie is shot in a simple but attractive way. The acting is great and the story has its moments but I felt like an uninterested snorkeler at times, occasionally dipping my head beneath the waves to witness beauty but finding it boring far quicker than I would have expected to.

6/10

GFR 6/10

Titbits

Much of the film was shot on location in the sea-side town of Haistings.
Saoirse Ronan went through twelve weeks of intensive training in order to perform the beautiful but complex Beethoven Sonata.
This is Neil Jordan's third foray into the undead following High Spirits and Interview with a Vampire.

The Iceman

2013-06-08T22:16:00.003+01:00

Between 1948 and 1986, New Jersey Mafia hitman Richard Kuklinski is said to have killed somewhere between one hundred and two hundred and fifty men. Having committed his first murder when in his middle teens, Kuklinski eventually gravitated towards the world of organised crime and for several decades worked as a contract killer for the DeCavalcante crime family based in Newark, New Jersey. He did all of this while posing to his family as a successful currency broker. The Iceman is Israeli director Ariel Vromen’s biopic thriller of the ice cold killer, based on interviews with the man himself. It stars an in form (when is he not?) Michael Shannon in the lead role.

The Iceman is a film that I’ve been hotly anticipating for some time. I have an interest in the history of the Cosa Nostra and find that it often forms the basis of excellent movies. Although this is an above average film and features several great moments, it won’t go down with the likes of The Godfather, GoodFellas or even Donnie Brasco in the annals of the great mafia movies. I expect there will be many comparisons drawn to Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece of the genre in particular but unfortunately, despite a fantastic basis for a story, the film is like a skimming stone. It skips along the surface without delving into the murky deep beneath the surface.

The movie isn’t very plot driven and works much better as a character study. The plot generally revolves around the central character’s lust for financial security and insatiable appetite for violence. The love for his family also runs deeply through the film from beginning to end and forms the basis for some of his actions. Even with these three facets, I never felt as though I got to know the man or his world. The thirty years or so that the film takes in often flies by far too quickly and it feels as though important events are rushed through or missed out altogether. What keeps the film ticking over is the highly skilled direction and cinematography and a spell binding central performance from Michael Shannon.

When I got home I was disappointed and a little shocked to discover that the film was shot on location in Detroit, Michigan and Shreveport, Louisiana. While watching it I didn’t think for one minute that the movie had been filmed outside of the New York-New Jersey area as the detail was spot on. In one scene in particular, when Kuklinski carries out his initiation with Ray Liotta’s Roy DeMeo I actually thought about the logistics behind shutting down a small portion of Lower Manhattan for filming the scene and how it must have taken time to remove all of the modern street furniture. Perhaps this not only speaks to how closely the scene resembled Manhattan but also to how invested I was in the story. I don’t recall thinking about filming logistics in The Godfather.

As well as excellent location recreation, which includes an under construction World Trade Centre in one scene, the film is also notable for its fantastic costume work. The period clothes looks great in both their accuracy and their visual appeal. As Kuklinski kills more and more people, his and his family’s wardrobe becomes much more stylish and he becomes ever more dapper. The cars and houses also show a visible increase in wealth. Something which I wondered about while watching was how the real man’s wife didn’t know that something fishy was happening. For all his money and prestige, he rarely discussed his cover job. I’d personally find this very strange but it’s either something that Mrs. Kuklinski failed to pick up on or purposely ignored.

The casting of The Iceman is near perfect but there is one exception. Through no fault of his own, David Schwimmer is impossible to take seriously in a role like the one he is cast in here. Throughout the film I watched intensely with a slight furrowed brow but whenever Schwimmer appeared, he raised a smile on my face. Just the sight of him, especially with the comedy moustache reminiscent of the same one from the Friends home videos episodes, was enough to make me giggle. I feel a little sorry for the actor because he doesn’t do much wrong in the role but because of his success elsewhere I just can’t take him seriously here.

The rest of the cast excel and are lead superbly by Michael Shannon who is quietly becoming one of the best actors working in Hollywood today. To look into his eyes is to be met with the same weight and force of a late summer thunderstorm. You can feel the heat and pressure behind his intense glare. It sometimes feels as though if he were to look up, he could will the rain down from the clouds. It’s rare to find an actor deliver so frequently as Shannon and this performance is amongst his best. He carries the film on his broad shoulders and embodies the icy mentality needed to play the character. He is unflinching in the murder scenes and barely bats and eyelid when confronted with a gun to the head. The pent up anger and malice that occasionally burst from within him is terrifying.

Alongside Shannon is a back on form Ray Liotta. Since GoodFellas it could be argued that Liotta has somewhat wandered in the movie wilderness but he is back on solid and familiar ground here. He shows both the danger and tenderness which you come to associate with his character and it’s nice to see him in this sort of movie again. Chris Evans is unrecognisable for all but one of his scenes. I saw his name in the opening credits and kept wondering when he’d show up only to find out that he’d been on screen all along without realising it was him. This performance is one of the best I’ve seen him give so far. Winona Ryder plays her part in a coy and cute manner early on, getting stronger and more forceful as the years of living with someone like Kuklinski take their toll. John Ventimiglia is superb in a small role and Stephen Dorff and James Franco have decent cameos. Young McKaley Miller also looks like a ready made star.

The film is pretty violent and doesn’t shy away from showing what Kuklinski did with his life. The violence doesn’t often linger though and it comes in short, sharp bursts. The movie in general is fairly fast paced but it slows occasionally. I found the slower sections more to my liking but it mixes up the pacing effectively. The movie also looks great. It has a slight greenish-blue hue to it which works well and interiors are nicely dark and smoky. For me the main problem with the film is that a two hour movie just isn’t enough time to study the life and psyche of a man like Richard Kuklinski. He is far too interesting to cram into two hours and as I said earlier, this means that the film barely scratches the surface. It’s almost like the introductory overview to the character and I was yearning for something more substantial to get my teeth into. Despite its flaws though, The Iceman is a gritty, well made Mafia thriller which features some skilled film making prowess and an award contending central performance.

7.5/10

GFR 6/10

Titbits

James Franco was originally cast in Chris Evans' roll and Benicio Del Toro was replaced by Ray Liotta. Maggy Gyllenhaal dropped out due to pregnancy.
The film has a body count of 15.
The movie had its premier at The Venice Film Festival.

Red State

2013-06-08T09:29:00.002+01:00

Red State, more thriller than horror, is a film inspired by those nonsense sprouting, humanity hating people of the Westboro Baptist Church as well the as current terrorism policy. Three teenage boys peruse the internet looking for local women to have sex with but discover that their chosen woman isn’t all that she said she was online. The boys find themselves locked inside a church with hate preacher Abin Cooper (Michael Parks) talking about the end of days. He puts humanity’s demise down to homosexuality and has the bought the boys to his church to help free the world of sexual deviancy. Unfortunately for Cooper, a routine police patrol drives past his compound and discovers a car wanted in connection with a road traffic accident. When the police officer hears shots from inside the church he calls for backup and soon an ATF team lead by Joseph Keenan (John Goodman) is on the scene.

I’m generally in favour of any movie which highlights the evil of organised religion. Whether through subtle satire or full blown exploratory investigation, if religion is getting a kicking then I’m on board. What Red State does though is make both sides the bad guys. The despicable, murdering in the name of Jesus loons obviously get a hard time from the film makers but so do the Government Agents bought in to take them down.

The movie is shot in an exciting and fast paced manner with cameras often seemingly strapped to actors when running around. There is some fast cutting which is interspersed with longer, quieter scenes and this works well to build anticipation and dread before all out action. The film is violent but not unnecessarily so given the subject matter and plot. I was a little bit surprised by the reaction of the ATF guys who arrive to defuse the volatile situation that has arisen though. Without wanting to give away spoilers, their orders seem on the harsh side, even for people who are as fundamentally deserving as the church members. Speaking of the church, the pastor and church is obviously based on Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist dicks but the film makes a very conscious effort to make it clear that these characters aren’t them. I assume this was done to avoid the possibility of being sued but it ends up in a piece of dialogue which doesn’t fit. There is also far too much exposition in the early part of the film.

Michael Parks delivers a fine performance as the charismatic and calm cult leader, pitching it somewhere between total belief and insanity. Melissa Leo also makes for a well cast congregation member. The sex seeking boys are ok but don’t stand out amongst the hate, blood and bullets and John Goodman is on top form. Red State is an odd film. I liked what it had to say about religious nut jobs and it was and interesting idea but I’m not sure I enjoyed the execution. There’s no denying that it looks good, especially for a film produced on such a low budget, but it feels like it loses its way. In the end I’m not sure what the film is trying to do. Is it anti religion, anti Government, both? The message gets muddled in the carnage that surrounds the second act and once the bullets start flying, I lost interest. Red State is a film worth watching and it might well speak to you if you have impassioned beliefs but for me it was a bit like a long, loud argument that two neighbours were having over a brick wall. There’s a lot being said but you can’t discern what it is.

5/10

The Invisible Man

2013-06-07T21:52:00.004+01:00

“He’s invisible, and mad!” Those four short words from the classic Universal horror The Invisible Man sum up the film more than any plot synopsis ever could. Directed by James Whale in between 1931’s Frankenstein and 1935’s Brideof Frankenstein, the movie is often overshadowed by its monstrous companions but The Invisible Man should not be overlooked. The movie features some astounding and groundbreaking special effects which seem years ahead of their time. These are combined with H.G. Wells’ classic story to form a memorable if not at times slightly formulaic horror movie.

Production on The Invisible Man was fraught with difficulty and set backs and the story went through several incarnations before it was decided to follow Wells’ own novel closely. Alternative versions featured invisible rats or even foregoing Wells’ novel altogether but it was finally decided to use the source text much more closely than originally intended. Casting for the central role was also difficult with a number of actors including Whale favourites Boris Karloff and Colin Clive coming and going before an unknown English stage actor was given the part on the merit of a rather disastrous screen test. Claude Rains had just one Hollywood screen test, years before the film was made and it didn’t go particularly well. It was said that his acting was stiff but forced and the test lead nowhere. When James Whale was looking for an actor whose voice would be doing the acting though, Rains’ test screamed out to him and he was offered the part.

It is Claude Rains’ performance (along with the special effects) which really makes the film the success that it is. For almost every shot his face is invisible, either hidden behind bandages or actually see through. Because of this the actor had to do all of his acting by way of his voice, and what a voice. When disembodied his voice is eerily haunting but there is menace when hidden behind clothes and bandages too. The character is much more sadistic and violent that I had imagined beforehand and Rains’ voice really helps to highlight this. While the supporting cast around him over act and mug at the camera, Rains’ gives a terrifying but natural performance. Una O’Connor, one of my least favourite things about Bride of Frankenstein is on hand here to once again prove what I hate about her acting style and many of the cast seem to follow her lead with overly dramatic interpretations of fear coupled with ridiculous faux English accents. Gloria Stuart is one of the few besides Rains to shine. She would go on to receive an Academy Award nomination over sixty-five years later for her performance in Titanic.

The special effects, as I already mentioned, are simply incredible. When you consider that this film was made in the same year that construction began on The Golden Gate Bridge or that Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, you begin to understand just how old it is. Despite its age, the effects are still capable of astounding the viewer. To create the illusion of invisibility, special effects designer John Fulton masked the ‘invisible’ area of skin in black velvet and set the actor against a black velvet background. By then shooting the background separately and combining the images, the director was able to create the desired invisibility effect. This method is very much the precursor to blue screen and today’s green screen. It was slightly simpler to give the effect of the invisible man moving inanimate objects. This was done through the use of wires but the effect still looks excellent. I noticed the wires in only one shot. For some of the dramatic action scenes, miniatures were used. John Fulton would use his mastery of special effects in other Universal horror pictures of the time but like actor Claude Rains would work with Alfred Hitchcock where he did some of his most memorable work in the likes of Saboteur, Rear Window and Vertigo.

If I’m perfectly honest, I was a little bored by the story of The Invisible Man. I’m a fan of H.G. Wells writing but felt like this one didn’t really go anywhere. The idea of invisibility being a metaphor for the outsider was interesting but it got stuck in amongst the hunt for the man himself. The mad scientist element also feels like a bit of a cliché these days, even if this was one of the first examples. Overall though, the central performance and effects make up for the stories failings and culminate in producing some incredible sights and sounds which will remain with me.

7/10

Titbits

The movie would spawn four sequels made between 1940-44 and numerous remakes and re-imaginings have been produced over the years.
Boris Karloff turned down the role because the character isn't seen on screen until the very end.

Saboteur

2013-06-07T16:20:00.000+01:00

A few years ago, to me the name Alfred Hitchcock meant that old guy who was famous for making movies that I’d never seen. It took me far too long to watch any of his films but I’ve since been making up for this by watching as many as I can over the last couple of years. What amazes me each time is that almost every film I’ve seen has been at least in part brilliant. Even those which I’m not so mad on often contain a couple of shots or scenes which astound my eyes and he rarely if ever fails to thrill. The latest Hitchcock to flash excitedly in front of my eyes is his 1942 spy thriller, Saboteur. Production on the movie began just two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor and patriotism, symbolism and propaganda run right the way through the picture in every scene and character.

Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) is an aircraft factory worker from Southern California. Following a fire at the plant, in which his good friend dies, the evidence leads detectives to believe that Kane is responsible and he becomes a wanted man, travelling across the country in a bid to unveil the German spy ring that he believes is the true culprit. Along the way he becomes acquainted with Patricia Martin (Pricilla Lane), a model and patriot who attempts to turn the wanted man in time and time again. Their travels lead them to the hornet’s nest in New York City where the suspected spies are planning their latest piece of sabotage.

Saboteur opens with a gorgeous noir style shot which plays beneath the opening credits. It’s a simple single shot of a huge metal gate on which a man’s shadow can be seen. The shadow gets slowly larger and closer to the centre of the frame in what is an incredibly ominous and uneasy looking shot. Already inside just a few moments and one camera angle, Hitchcock creates excitement and intrigue which although subsiding slightly during the first half of the film, comes back with vengeance for the superb ending. The opening few scenes are also intrigue filled but once the film goes on the run with the central character, this is replaced with excitement. The two emotions the film seizes from its audience are equally enjoyable to experience and work in tandem to create a more than solid film.

The script is tense and exciting but unfortunately the dialogue occasionally comes across as corny. It’s also terribly of its time and full of sentences which begin with words such as “Say…” and “Supposin’…”. The 1940s has a reputation, often unwarranted, for producing movies in which the actors talk at break neck speed. To be honest, this movie is a prime example of that. It’s amusing at times and quite stereotypical. I was often reminded of that Family Guy ‘Fast Talking, High Trousers’ sketch. What also comes across in the script is how events surrounding the film impacted upon it. Obviously with a plot about German spies, there’s going to be references to the war but the film talks more about being an American and what that means rather than about hunting Germans. It feels like a liberal precursor to McCarthyism in that fingers are pointed at various people who are forced to prove their innocence and patriotism.

What’s nice about the plot is that it’s often the authority figures who are viewed as menacing or suspicious whereas it’s simple folk, blind men, circus people who come across as the nice guys. I quite like what that says about authoritarianism in general, something which the Allies were in part fighting against. There is also symbolism abound in the movie. One scene passes the SS Normandie (USS Lafayette) which caught fire and capsized while being converted to a troopship at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Though the accident was never attributed to any group, it was long thought to be a result of sabotage and this shot shows of the potential destruction that can be caused by such an action. Another form of symbolism comes with the location of the movie’s tremendous final scenes which are set at The Statue of Liberty where good vs. bad, Fascism vs. Capitalism meet for the closing battle.

The final scenes are probably the best in the movie. For this sequence, the film’s fantastic score dips out and the visuals alone are used to convey the tension and excitement of the scene. There are some clever special effects here too. Matte painted backdrops are used to great effect to create the sense that the studio footage is being shot at the famous landmark. The climactic shot also used some ingenious camera trickery. The scene in general is fantastically exciting. I actually gasped when Robert Cummings stepped over the small barrier, hundreds of feet above the ground. It’s a terrific climax to a superb film.

Overall I thought that Saboteur was excellent. Not only is it an entertaining film but it can also be viewed as an interesting historical document, detailing attitudes and practices of the period. As you’d expect it’s wonderfully and imaginatively shot and the plot ticks along, rarely dipping below mildly exciting. The two leads are good but I felt that acting wasn’t at its best overall but this doesn’t detract from another suspenseful thriller from the master of the genre.

8/10

Titbits

Lead actor would work for Hitchcock again twelve years later in Dial M for Murder.
The director's cameo comes about an hour into the film where he can be seen standing in front of a kiosk in New York.
Hitchcock originally wanted Cary Grant and Barbara Stanwyck to star but was unable to afford them on the film's budget.
This was Hitchcock's first movie to feature an all American cast.

Blazing Saddles

2013-06-05T09:52:00.002+01:00

Blazing Saddles is a 1974 satirical Western-Comedy written and directed by Mel Brooks. One of Brooks’ many parody films, Blazing Saddles was a huge box office hit, becoming only the tenth film in history to pass the $100 million mark upon its release. It opened to mixed reviews but is now generally regarded as a classic. The film takes place in the Old West in 1874 where the peaceful town of Rock Ridge is under siege from a crocked State Attorney General (Harvey Korman) who wants to clear the town in order to build his new railroad through it. The local townsfolk decide to send for a Sheriff and the Governor (who is under the control of the Attorney General) sends a black man (Cleavon Little) in the hope that his presence in the little, all while town will send the residents fleeing faster than any gun slinging cowboy could.

Like most people, I have seen Blazing Saddles before. It’s one of those films that you’ve probably seen bits of, even if you’ve never heard of it. The beans scene for instance will be instantly recognisable to everyone. The one and only time that I saw the film before today was probably about fifteen years ago, before my voice (and other things) had dropped. I remember laughing a lot at the film and thought I was well over due a second watch. Disappointingly I didn’t laugh much this time. I chuckled occasionally and liked the whole idea of the film but much of the humour either went over my head or under my nose.

As a rule I tend to like at least the premise of Mel Brooks films. They always appear to have clever, often witty ideas behind them and this is no exception. What I hadn’t remembered from my pre-teen viewing was the amount of explicitly racist language. There’s enough N-word usage in this movie to make even Quentin Tarantino blush. What I hadn’t realised was that the plot had a lot of racial themes to it. I assumed/remembered that it was about funny cowboys, farting and punching horses. What it actually is is a subtle satire on both 1970s racial feeling and the erasing of black characters from Western history and folk law. In this respect the film is a raging success. Many of the characters are hostile to the black characters in the early stages of the film but as it progresses, the central character’s spirit, bravery, good humour and cunning bring them round to accepting him as a member and leader of their community.

Apart from the cultural aspects of the plot, it doesn’t differ a whole lot from your average Western. There are good guys, trying to run the bad guys out of town. Gunslingers, drunks, cowboys and chorus girls make up the cast of characters and there is a typical redemption story thrown in for good measure. The movie plays around with some of the Western archetypes though for comic effect. Every person in the town for instance is named Johnson, something which it actually took me a few minutes to pick up on. There’s fun poked at gambling laws, the treatment of native people and the Chinese (who are again almost always absent from the ‘Hollywood West’). Aside from the Western humour, the film is also notable for its more surrealist take on the genre. There are odd inclusions such as the use of a toll booth to slow the bad guys down but the last ten minutes is the weirdest and best of all.

In the final scenes the movie smashes the forth wall like a sharpened knife stabbed with force through thin, wet paper. During the climactic fight scene, an all out battle between pretty much every member of the cast, the camera lifts and pans from the town, showing the entire Warner Brothers studio back lot. It then zooms down to a neighbouring studio where a Fred Astaire type musical is being filmed. After a few moments, the cast of Blazing Saddles comes crashing through the walls, still fighting. The fight then picks up more characters as it storms through the studio lot and out onto the Hollywood streets. If that’s unusual for you then it gets even stranger. A couple of the characters peel off to a movie theatre where they watch their own film on the screen. It’s an almost psychedelic scene and by far the highlight of the whole movie.

I thought that the sets (the actual Western sets) looked very good and were pleasingly authentic. The location shooting was also pretty. The acting was another strong area. Cleavon Little plays the role with just the right touches of seriousness, humour and cool and pulls of what must have been a tough role. Gene Wilder is good fun to watch but his big moments come later the same year in Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. Harvey Korman is nicely camp and really thesps up his role. His constant annoyance at people referring to him as Hedy Lamarr was great fun. Madeline Kahn was enjoyable; her role reminded me a lot of Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again. Slim Pickens provides some good solid laughs too.

Overall I enjoyed Blazing Saddles. It was good, silly fun and I can appreciate its appeal. The story is strong and it’s well made but I was expecting to laugh just a little more. Despite failing to find the film very funny, I was generally transfixed by the rest of the movie and would recommend it to anyone who has yet to see it in full.

7/10

Titbits

The central character of Bart was intended for Richard Pryor but because of Pryor's controversial stand up and drug use, Brooks couldn't secure funding with him in the role. Pryor became co-writter instead.
John Wayne was offered a part but turned it down. He did however state that he couldn't wait to see the finished movie.
The character Hedley Lamarr is a play on words with Hedy Lamarr, the popular and beautiful actress who was also a renowned mathemetician.

Mud

2013-06-04T17:59:00.000+01:00

Mud is a sticky, sweaty and swampy coming of age film about two boys, a man and a boat in a tree. Two adventurous teenage boys who live on the Mississippi river find a boat up a tree on a small deserted island, miles from anywhere. Excited at the prospect of their new, secluded secret hideout, the boys soon discover that the boat is in fact inhabited by a strange man who calls himself Mud. Initially wary of the stranger, the boys get close to the man and help him first by bringing food and then with plans to complete the Herzogian task of bringing the boat down from the tree. This is all set against a gritty, humid backdrop with a hint that something in the air smells like death.

I thought I’d missed my chance to see Mud at the cinema but found a midday screening I was able to slip into on a day off work. I’d been looking forward to it as the trailer looked promising and I’ve become a fan of Matthew McConaughey’s ‘McConaissance’. Having now seen it I can report that for me the film worked well but there was just something that niggled with me. I can’t put my finger on the problem but it wasn’t long before I was fidgety and bored.

The film feels a little bit like an amalgamation of several other movies. There are shades of the boy’s-own coming of age adventure of Stand by Me but set in a place more reminiscent of Beastsof the Southern Wild. The texture of the film felt quite similar to Killer Joe in the way that the landscapes were so clammy that they seemed to fill the cinema. Unfortunately, despite having bits of all of those films in here, it doesn’t live up to any of them. The story is initially at least, very interesting. I was fascinated by the riverside community and lifestyle and how it fit with the world of the modern American teen. Mud’s back story and reasons for being on the island were also something I was eagerly awaiting discovery of but it doesn’t take long before it becomes obvious. From about twenty minutes in, the plot is pretty much laid out in front of the audience and it’s just a matter of dotting the Is and crossing the Ts.

Something which didn’t sit well with me was the portrayal of the female characters. There are only three females in the entire movie and without wanting to give too much away, each one is a bit of a bitch. The women all end the film as villains and the moral of the story seems to be ‘Don’t trust ‘em’. I don’t know if this is in some way how the world is meant to be seen through the eyes of the fourteen year old central character of if the writer had just been through a particularly tough breakup but there are male characters that kill people who get an easier ride than the female characters.

The acting from the principle cast is pretty good across the board. Youngsters Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland play the two boys at the centre of the story and both are excellent in their own right. Their characters are very distinct and they play their roles with great maturity. Matthew McConaughey delivers another fine performance as the title character. He isn’t as creepy as you’d expect for a man living alone on an island but has warmth in his heart. Reese Withersppon is fine and it’s nice to see her in something a little gritty but she isn’t given much to do. The same goes for Michael Shannon who I love to see in anything but isn’t stretched here. Sam Shepard has a small role and filled the screen with his presence.

A couple of years ago I was very impressed with the cinematography of Director Jeff Nichols’ fantastic Take Shelter. Once again he’s produced a film which looks great but it isn’t quite as striking as his previous work. Still, there are some delightful vistas and sumptuous yet dirty looking shots of the river community and small town. This is a good looking film by anyone’s standards. The movie had a similar sense of oncoming dread as Take Shelter but like the visuals, this too was toned down. Overall though the story just didn’t grab me and I was able to plot its path fairly easily. I became restless around the half way mark and didn’t get comfortable again until the final few scenes. Mud is well acted and looks good but I was expecting just a little more from the talented writer/director.

6/10

GFR 7/10

Titbits

The T-Shirt Neckbone wears in the first few scenes features the Washington D.C. band Fugazi. It has nothing to do with the film Donnie Brasco.
Chris Pine was originally considered for the title role.
The idea of moving a boat across awkward terrain has been explored before in Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.

Galaxy Quest

2013-06-03T21:00:00.002+01:00

Galaxy Quest is a loving homage to Star Trek and its associated fandom. Tim Allen stars as an actor famous for his portrayal of a ship’s captain in a formerly popular TV sci-fi series. He and his crew of actors travel from city to city appearing at various conventions, signings and store openings, events which some of the cast find demeaning. When Jason Naismith (Allen) is approached for a role playing gig with some super-fans, he discovers to his surprise that the ‘fans’ are in fact aliens who are at war with alien warlord and require Naismith’s help, believing the TV show to be a historical document and the actors to be real life heroes.

I saw a few minutes of Galaxy Quest a couple of months ago and thought that it looked like an interesting idea. A friend lent me the DVD last week and I was excited about watching it. Unfortunately I didn’t feel like the film lived up to its promising premise. There are some nice Star Trek references and the idea isn’t without intelligence but I failed to laugh once and felt that once the initial reveal had occurred that there was very little left of interest to me.

I quite like the original Star Trek TV series. While I’d never go out of my way to watch it, I used to watch it if it was on when I was young. The same goes for The Next Generation. Like most satires or parodies, I think that this film would work better for a hardcore fan. Even as someone who knows a little about the Star Trek universe though, I was able to appreciate some of the in-jokes, even if they didn’t actually make me laugh. There were small things like how the Kirk character ended up shirtless for no reason and how the female character was purely in the film as a bit of totty for the mainly male audience. The Spock like character was fed up of being defined by this one role and there is even a ‘Redshirt’ character that spends the whole movie fearful that he’s going to die at any moment. The film also explores some of the illogical plot devices and ideas from the show. Things like this were loving and clever and worked well as a pastiche but I had problems with the plot in general.

One of the issues I had with the film is that I didn’t really care much about the characters. Tim Allen’s character was a bit of a dick and I didn’t feel like his redemption fully worked. Alan Rickman was excellent but I got bored of his frequent moaning. Sigourney Weaver was also fine but her character wasn’t that far removed from the character she was meant to be playing and parodying. The idea of actors being stuck in a rut because of a role they once played and not being able to leave it behind due to financial restraint is at least something of interest but it gets muddled in the off world elements. I really enjoyed the alien species who come to Earth for help though. They are octopus type creatures who morph into human form only they haven’t quite got it right. As a result their walk and speech is a little off. It was one of my favourite things about the movie.

The effects are a little mixed. I was hoping for some obviously bad effects to mirror the cheap work in the series the film is parodying but it feels more like they went all out to make them look good. Sometimes this is successful but there are many scenes in which the CGI looks dated. The practical effects look very goof though. Overall I wasn’t overly impressed with Galaxy Quest but I thought it had some nice ideas and was a loving parody of Star Trek. My main problem is that it wasn’t funny enough and I also wasn’t particularly interested in the character and plot. It isn’t a film completely without merit though and I can understand its appeal to hardcore Trekkies.

5/10

Titbits

The shape of the ship is based on a Star Trek coms badge.
The film was intended to be much darker but was re-cut for a PG certificate after failing to impress test audiences.
This was the début film for both Justin Long and Rainn Wilson.

Dancer in the Dark

2013-06-02T17:42:00.000+01:00

There are some films I just don’t get. Occasionally a film will be met with critical acclaim and it feels the whole world but me is enamoured with it. Other times, there are commercial behemoths which storm to billions of dollars but leave me disheartened. I feel slightly better about myself for my reaction to Lars von Trier’s 2000 Palme d’Or winning Dancer in the Dark. The film divided critics like few others have before or since. It won awards and was met with praise from the likes of Roger Ebert but received damming criticisms from Peter Bradshaw and many others. Personally I’m with Bradshaw.

Dancer in the Dark feels crass and manipulative and has a story which left me both bored and perplexed. Despite some interesting song and dance numbers and a frankly terrifying ending, I felt at times as though it was a film that would never end and couldn’t wait for it to do so.

The movie is at least partly inflected by the Dogme 95 experiment. Although this film features paid actors and musical accompaniment, the cinematography is mainly handheld in a documentary style. This allows the director to get close to his subjects, aiding realism all the while. The acting, as mixed as it is, further aids the realism but I have to admit I was more than a little put off by the number of nationalities and accents in the cast. The idea split me in two. On the one hand I thought to myself, “Why shouldn’t a director choose an actor because of their nationality or ability to speak a certain way?” but another part of me found it off-putting to have so many accents on screen at once without much reasoning for it. It took me several minutes to work out that the film was even set in the USA.

The plot features a near blind woman called Selma who is played by Icelandic singer/composer Björk. Selma struggles to make ends meet and is desperately saving money so that her son can have a sight saving eye operation. In her day job as a factory machine worker, Selma dreams of musicals and takes evening drama classes in which she has been cast as Maria in a production of The Sound of Music. There’s a whole load of stuff going on in Dancer in the Dark but from my point of view, I just wasn’t interested in any of it. There are themes of betrayal, anti-Communism, face saving and parental love all at work here but I felt the whole thing got bogged down in the stylistic framework which just didn’t work.

I found it hard to focus on the screen because of the juddering, handheld cinematography but the musical numbers where a little more conventional. Von Trier set up several digital cameras to capture takes and these were always stationary. It’s an interesting idea and it creates the sense that the songs are day dreams which matches the narrative structure. It got to the stage where I was eagerly awaiting the next song, not because I’m a huge Björk fan or that I thought they were great, but merely because, like the central character, they took me away from the main story, a story which did nothing for me. It wasn’t until the final scene that my interest returned. It is a horrific and terrifying scene in which I found my eyes were half closed. Come the climactic drop I had to close my eyes altogether. This scene is wonderfully written, shot and acted by all involved.

As I already mentioned, the acting was mixed. Even the central actress herself delivers a very up and down performance but overall I thought it worked. There were times when you could see her lack of craft and experience but sometimes this added to the realistic nature of the film. Catherine Deneuve feels a little wasted but she handles herself well and Peter Stormare is good. David Morse is also pretty decent. My problem with the acting wasn’t so much in the performances but in the overall impression that the cast gave. They often looked lost or out of sync with each other and didn’t seem to really gel. It was almost as though they were reading from different pages or even different scripts.

Overall then I didn’t enjoy Dancer in the Dark. Having said that, I can’t say I’ve ever really ‘enjoyed’ any Lars von Trier film but I feel like he has made several that are better. The cinematography annoyed me, I took very little from the plot and the casting didn’t quite work. Having said that, I quite liked the songs and when she was good, Björk was excellent. The ending is also very memorable and helped to create a better lasting impression of the film than the previous two hours deserved.

4/10

Titbits

Catherine Deneuve's character was originally written as an African-American but when the actress wrote to the director about the possibility of working together, von Trier re-wrote the part for Deneuve.
Von Trier and Bjork reportedly had a near impossible working relationship. Deneuve reported that both the director and star were difficult to work with.
The soundtrack to the movie was released as an album with the title Selmasongs. It reached the top-40 in nine countires.

City Girl

2013-06-02T12:44:00.002+01:00

F.W. Murnau’s 1930 film City Girl was the third of just four that the German cinematic pioneer made in Hollywood. With 1928’s 4 Devils among the thousands of lost films from the period, we only have three left from the Director who in his home land made such iconic movies as Nosferatu and The Last Laugh. City Girl shares many themes with his masterpiece Sunrise in that it is about love and the struggle between rural life and urbanisation.

Lem Tustine (Charles Farrell) is sent from his Minnesota farm to Chicago by his overbearing father to sell their wheat crop. While in the big city, the country boy meets and falls in love with a city waitress called Kate (Mary Duncan). Lem sells the family crop, but for a lower price than his father desired and brings his new bride back to the farm to meet his parents. Kate soon discovers that life in the country isn’t all she expected it to be and with leering men much the same as in the city and a father-in-law who distrusts her, she begins to think she’s made a huge mistake.

What is evident from all of Murnau’s films is what a supreme director he was. City Girl is a fairly restrained outing in terms of his expressionist style but he still hints at his origins with long shadows and half darkened rooms. This film is notable for a couple of action scenes including a dart across the wheat fields in a pony trap which is exhilarating. Murnau uses his camera to sway from one side of the cart to the other in an inventive and exciting manner and ends the scene with a suspenseful gunshot and clever use of intertitles. Speaking of intertitles, City Girl is today a silent film but a version with elements with sound was produced side by side with this surviving piece. Unfortunately, the part sound film is yet another example of a lost film.

Murnau captures the differences between the city and the country in a variety of ways. The city scenes are bustling and crowded and every extra seems in a rush to get to one place or another. The scenes inside the café where the two leads first become acquainted are equally as busy as outside and Murnau effectively creates the illusion of sweaty, city heat to further exemplify the stifling city. The Chicago scenes are also very brightly lit. Mary Duncan’s apartment looks out over flashing neon signs and an elevated railway just inches from her window is thrown in for good measure. On the contrary to the city scenes, the country sequences are poorly lit with characters using oil lamps in order to navigate the house and fields at night. These scenes are also sparsely decorated. The family home has bare walls and minimal furniture.

Something else which differs is the score. It’s difficult to know if the version I saw featured Arthur Kay’s original score but either way, the version I heard was excellent. The city scenes features an upbeat, fast tempo but jolting score which captures the frenetic stop-start pace of city life. When in the country, the score is much more lackadaisical, with a slower pace and instruments that are more associated with country music. The score works beautifully to illustrate the differences between the two locations and it’s even better in the dramatic moments.

I don’t know if there was something in the Hollywood water in the late 20s and early 30s but many of the best romantic films I’ve seen are from this period. Chaplin’s 1931 City Lights is my favourite romantic film of all time and Murnau’s Sunrise runs it close. This film can comfortably sit in the company of the two I’ve just mentioned based on its romantic credentials. The scenes in which the couple fall in love are just beautiful and the writing and acting are superb. The film is really sweet and I was willing the couple on from the start. In the busy Chicago restaurant it’s easy to see why Kate falls for Lem’s polite, country ways and Kate’s beauty and city wits are equally as desirable. They make for a great couple. When I paused the film around the half way mark I was shocked to find that I was only forty-five minutes in because I suddenly realised that there must be something on the way which will disrupt the couple’s happiness in order to warrant another forty-five minutes. I actually got a little fearful for what was coming, so was my enchantment with the couple.

Other than love, the film makes discussion of the pros and cons of city vs. country living. The movie was made just months into the Great Depression, at a time when living was tough in both town and country but when urbanisation was on the increase in the industrialised west. It was a time when people were looking elsewhere for work and happiness and the couple’s push/pull from city to country epitomises the west as a whole at that time. The desperation that many people found themselves living in at the time is also explored with the need for the crop to be a success but this is only lightly touched upon. Fidelity and trust is another area in which the film delves into and this forms a major part of the third act.

Both leads deliver tremendous performances in City Girl. I was disappointed to read that Mary Duncan gave up the profession just a couple of years after this movie wrapped as she had real star quality. Charles Farrell had a longer lasting career and in 1950 became the Mayor of Palm Springs. I was so invested in the romance that I was hoping to read that the actors also got together but alas this wasn’t the case. The movie is a prime example of screen chemistry working at its best and the lead actors are every bit as responsible as the writer and director for making this film work. David Torrence plays the formidable father figure with great vigour and is terrifying. His constant scowl works to overshadow the central romance for long periods while Richard Alexander is quietly devious but charming as the love rival.

It’s understandable why City Girl is held up as a silent movie gem. It’s expertly made, well written and delightfully acted and has a timeless central love story which had me gripped for the entire run time.

8/10

Six of the Best... Films about Film

2013-06-02T11:11:00.000+01:00

Many art forms dip into the self-referential. From songs about songs to paintings depicting the artist painting that particular work, art is always willing to look at itself. Films are no different. From the very earliest cinematic experiments, movies drew inspiration from or indeed focused entirely on the filmmaking process. Even at the turn of the last century, filmmakers were experimenting with the ideas of putting film on film. The Big Swallow is a 1901 surrealist short in which a man steps closer and closer to the camera before swallowing it whole. Since then films have looked at the cameraman’s craft (Man With a Movie Camera – 1929), the screenwriting process (Adaptation – 2002), Sound Design (Berbarian Sound Studio - 2012) and in some movies, characters even come to recognise their own fictional existence (Stranger than Fiction – 2006). So without further ado, here is my list of Six of the Best… Films about Film.

1. Cinema Paradiso – 1988

Giuseppe Tornatore’s Italian masterpiece features a middle aged film director returning to his small Sicilian village for the first time in decades in order to attend the funeral of his friend and mentor. The movie then takes us forward from the director’s earliest years until adulthood through his love of the motion picture. I’ve never seen adoration of cinema so beautifully and overtly displayed before and the movie features clips of many famous and less so well known movies from the silent era forwards. The local cinema becomes the beating heart of the town and brings joy to many in the post war depression that hit the country hard. The process of projection is lovingly demonstrated and the movie’s final scene is perhaps the most beautiful I’ve ever seen and contains some of the most breathtaking images in all cinema history.

2. Sherlock Jr – 1924

Buster Keaton’s 1924 feature isn’t really about cinema per se but features a famous sequence in which the star falls asleep at a projector. His subconscious then walks into the theatre itself and enters the screen. This surrealist moment then forms the main narrative as Keaton plays a character on screen in his dream state. This early self-referential style of movie making was ahead of its time both in terms of the idea and the technical proficiency needed to make it work. The film also ends with Keaton mirroring a movie star’s mannerisms and actions to woo the woman of his dreams. Keaton would go back to making movies about movies with 1928’s The Cameraman.

3. Boogie Nights – 1997

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights turns the camera on the filmmaking process though the films aren’t the sort that your mother would want you watching. A film about the 1970s porn industry may well have come off as seedy but in Anderson’s hands it ended up as a near classic. The movie looks at the filmmaking process and techniques which make it work as well as the life of its stars. The movie also delves into the arrogance and big-headedness that being a star can give a person and the dangers of letting fame and stardom go to your head. The movie has an all star cast, despite its subject matter and was nominated for three Oscars. It’s an unflinching look at how the pornography industry worked and its parallels to mainstream movie making are apparent.

4. Chaplin – 1992

There have been relatively few movie biopics about the people behind movies. The Aviator – 2004 and Ed Wood – 1994 spring to mind but both of those films feature behind the camera stars. For a world obsessed with actors and celebrity, few films have touched upon the topic of ‘the film star’. Chaplin was Richard Attenborough’s biopic of Charlie Chaplin, who, for thirty years the most famous and highly paid entertainer in the world. Attenborough’s film is a fairly conventional and accurate retelling of the man behind the tramp but skirts over some of the more contentious issues in his life. Very much a film about the man rather than the star, Chaplin does however feature lots of juicy behind the scenes type footage and insight into the process of making a film. Scenes from his days at Keystone will be of special interest to anyone interested in early cinema.The movie is also notable for featuring Robert Downey Jr's finest performance to date.

5. 8½ - 1963

Federico Fellini’s 8½ is a film about director’s block. Partially autobiographical, it tells of a director lacking inspiration for his latest project and of the distractions which prevent him from completing it. The movie features themes including sex and marriage and how they impact on the director’s life but struggles behind the creative process are as much a part of the film as struggles of a more personal nature. Modernisation and having to adapt in an ever changing world is also something that’s at the heart of this movie. 8½ has become a classic which features on many top movie lists. It’s a beautifully shot, fascinating film that gets inside the mind of a director.

6. Sunset Boulevard – 1950

Billy Wilder’s 1950 whodunit Noir turns the camera on some of the seedier sides of Hollywood. The film is unafraid to show the soiled underbelly of the tentacled beast that is Tinseltown and looks not only at film but also at stardom. There are cameos abound from the great and good of the late silent era with the likes of Cecil B. DeMille, Buster Keaton and H.B. Warner appearing in small roles to add realism. The film tells the story of a faded Hollywood starlet whose madness and desire for the spotlight leads to tragedy. The screenwriting process is also examined through lead actor William Holden. Few films have ever been so self-critical but Sunset Boulevard is unashamedly so. The movie also features fascinating and insightful scenes set on the Paramount backlot and is one of the finest Noir films I’ve seen.

Sherlock Jr

2013-06-01T19:30:00.000+01:00

Sherlock Jr is rightly considered as one of the many great films of Buster Keaton’s career. The movie introduces many technical innovations and complex stunts which run side by side the screen comedian’s usual deadpan humour and sight gags to create one of his and the era’s best. A lowly movie theatre projectionist (Keaton) has two dreams in life. He wants to be a detective and wants to snare the love of his life. After being framed by a love rival for a burglary at the girl’s house he is banished, told never to return. His attempts to solve the crime and clear his name come to a dead end so he returns to the cinema where he falls asleep behind the projector. Here, the man literally splits in two (using double exposure) and the dream version of Sherlock Jr enters the movie screen where he has much more success at solving crimes and attracting the attention of beautiful women.

Few films from the era (or any era) display as much inventiveness or technical nouse as Sherlock Jr. Working at a time before many of the cinematic inventions that we take for granted today, including sound of course, Keaton here constructs a beautifully observed comedy which combines the detective genre with an introspective study of his medium while using romance as a framing device. The movie is, at just forty-four minutes, much shorter than most of his features, straddling somewhere between short and feature but barely a second of screen time is wasted with jokes coming thick and fast. If comedy ever does run dry, the eyes are dazzled with a technical marvel or bone crunching stunt which ninety years on, will still make the audience wince.

There are so many clever ideas and scenes crammed in to the forty-four minute run time that it’s easy to overlook them. In one of the early scenes our hero consults his ‘How to be a Detective’ handbook which clearly states that you should ‘Shadow your suspects closely’. What follows is a brilliantly choreographed and wonderfully executed scene in which Buster follows mere inches behind his lead suspect, mirroring his movement to near precision. When the man stops, Buster stops, the man picks up a cigarette, Buster follows suit, catching it when the man throws it away, matching him puff for puff. It looks like the sort of scene which would take weeks of preparation but knowing Buster Keaton, he probably just came up with the idea the week before and got it in a take or two. Another example of the inventiveness of Keaton and the film comes towards the climax. Speeding through country lanes in a car, Buster spots he is about to drive into a lake. He slams on the breaks and the entire chassis comes to a halt with the body work, complete with passengers shooting into the lake. The car then becomes a boat with Keaton using the retractable roof as a makeshift sail.

There is one gag which I couldn’t quite get my head around. The joke occurs when Keaton is playing pool. The film’s villain has replaced the number 15 ball with an identical copy that contains a bomb. When the ball is struck, a huge explosion will kill our hero. As Keaton breaks, the villain and his accomplice run for cover but despite the balls being knocked all over the table, the 15 ball stays put. Keaton then clears the whole table, resorting to seemingly impossible trick shots without ever striking the 15 ball. Even with clever cutting I still don’t know how he managed to do this. It’s as though the ball has an invisible force field around it which protects it from ever being touched. Whether completed with skill, persistence or trickery, it’s a genius scene.

As well as clever sight gags, the film is typical for its smart and dangerous stunts. One stand out is a prolonged motorbike ride. Keaton, sat atop the bike’s handlebars unwittingly loses his driver and travels several miles through heavy traffic without realising. To see him weave about through the busy streets is a joy for the eyes. The end of this sequence also features an early example of rear projection but the bulk of the scene is done for real. The movie is famous for being the movie in which the star broke his neck. When most people break their neck, they might take the rest of the day off but Buster Keaton just carried on with the scene and didn’t actually realise for several years, during a routing medical exam, that his neck was in fact broken. It wasn’t even a small break (if that’s possible) but it was a major fracture. Keaton had severe migraines for days following the accident but carried on regardless. You can actually see the moment in the film when Keaton is flattened by a jet of water, released from a railway water storage tank.

For me the film is most notable for its almost surrealist ‘film within a film’. When the real life projectionist falls asleep his subconscious awakens and walks out of the projection booth and into the auditorium. For a start it’s really nice to witness the projection and screening process of an early film but then things get really good. Keaton walks towards the screen and then steps into it, becoming part of the film within the film. The characters in the film change from actors to the ‘real’ people in the projectionist’s life. He then adopts the moniker of Sherlock Jr, a crime crushing criminologist who solves mysteries and wins his love’s heart. A fantastic sequence inside this device occurs when the backdrop on the cinema screen changes rapidly. Keaton finds himself standing outside a house before being on a busy road, on a mountain top, inside a lion cage and on a railway line. For the narrative of the film within a film this doesn’t make a lot of sense but from a visual and technical standpoint it’s breathtaking. To accomplish the scene, Keaton’s cameraman had to use surveyor’s equipment to accurately measure the actor’s precise distance from the camera as well as bodily position. It’s an incredible piece or artistic craftsmanship.

To be perfectly honest the plot of Sherlock Jr isn’t always great and it is far from his funniest film but the sheer audacity in creating some of the stunts and visuals more than make up for anything other areas may lack. Although not great, the plot is not without its charms and it ends up as a fairly conventional love story. Keaton again reverts to the movies for inspiration in his closing scene when the shy projectionist once again mirrors the actions of another, this time copying the mannerisms and actions of the real on-screen lothario whom he can see from his projection booth. His subtle glances to the screen are sweet and his girl seems to appreciate the effort. It’s a wonderful, romantic end to a highly inventive screen classic.

9/10

Titbits

There is some disagreement as to who directed this picture. Keaton hoped that his friend Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle would come on board as co-director following the scandal that ended his on screen career but whether he did or not has been lost to history.
The pool sequence took five days to shoot and Keaton had practised for four months with a trick shot expert. The five days worth of footage was edited as though to seem like just one game.
Buster Keaton's father Joe appears on screen with his son in one of his few movie appearances. The older Keaton was initially very sceptical of the moving picture and felt that his son's career lay on the stage where it had begun.

Juan of the Dead

2013-06-01T12:19:00.003+01:00

In early 2012, Juan of the Dead’s UK premier was held at my local art house cinema during their annual Spanish Language Film Festival. I was really annoyed that I couldn’t make the screening as I’d heard a lot of good things about the comedy-horror, the fist Cuban film I’d ever come across. Over a year later, LoveFilm sent me the DVD and I excitedly slid it into my player. Ninety-six minutes later I was a disappointed man. While Juan of the Dead has a lot of things going for it, I didn’t enjoy the broad comedy or unremarkable effects. It does however contain important political subtext which was much more to my liking.

Juan (Alexis Díaz de Villegas) is a middle aged Cuban, used to doing nothing on a regular basis. His wife left him some time ago, taking his daughter with her to Spain. Juan’s friend Lazaro (Jorge Molina) is in a similar situation but at least has his son Vladi (Andros Perugorría) for company. A strange illness begins to infect the people of the Caribbean island and those infected begin marauding through the streets, eating their friends and neighbours who in turn become infected themselves. Dismissed as dissidents, backed by America by the Cuban Government, it soon becomes apparent to Juan that no matter who or what they are, he and his friends have a battle for survival on their hands.

The political subtext behind Juan of the Dead is its strongest facet. The decision of whether to leave Cuba for the US, who is behind the outbreak and how the Government react to it are all very well written and the movie confidently says a lot without saying much at all. Ideas about these extraordinary events being just another one of those things for Cubans get to the heart of the day to day living that people of that island have endured for over half a century. There is strong opinion both in favour and against the regime and heavy satire about how it controls the media and thoughts of the people. The loss of Cuba’s youth to the US and other nations is also something that is explored and whenever the film became political, I was on board with it.

The problem with the movie is that there is another seventy minutes of running, jumping and zombie slashing which didn’t do anything for me. Because the film is obviously constrained by budget, it can’t show much zombie action but in attempting to, it further highlights the financial constraint. The effects and make-up aren’t great and the CGI rarely impresses. I don’t want to be down on the film because of these things but I always revert to Gareth Edwards’ Monsters when talking about small budget films and poor effects. The effects for that film were done on a shoestring budget and in the director’s bedroom so it is possible to create high end effects on a small budget.

Plot wise, the film was also found lacking. There is far too much running about and chopping zombie’s bits off without much purpose or direction. Eventually the group hit on the idea of forming a company which specialises in killing loved ones. This is a nice idea but is only really explored through a quick montage. The real gem in the plot is whether or not to leave, something which again is politically motivated. There is a subplot involving Juan’s relationship with his daughter Camila (Andrea Duro) but that almost feels like something bolted on in a late draft. It adds bulk to the script but not much heft. Andrea Duro is beautiful to look at and she is one of the better actors but her role feels like a poor attempt to add a female character. As I’ve already mentioned, I wasn’t a fan of the comedy either. It was very broad and crass with little intelligence behind it. The physical comedy has all been done before but the more satirical stuff was better handled. Watching a fat man masturbate on a rooftop doesn’t hit my funny bone but a brief speech about leaving Cuba for somewhere that hasn’t heard of Cuba or Castro or Communism was much more to my taste. The set up for jokes also seem to take an age. It’s simply not snappy enough.

The acting is average on the whole. Alexis Díaz de Villegas is the stand out as Juan, a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. He portrays the political dilemmas well and has a dry comic timing which is well judged. Andrea Duro is also good, as is Andros Perugorría. Jorge Molina overplays it for me and a couple of others are stifled by poor characters. Jazz Vila is really annoying as cross-dressing effeminate China but I enjoyed his boyfriend El Primo (Eliecer Ramírez), a giant who fights with a bandanna over his eyes because he faints at the sight of blood.

In the end, Juan of the Dead is a decent attempt at a comedy-horror but it misses the mark. There’s probably an excellent short film in there but I wasn’t enamoured by the broad comedy and slow, meandering plot. As a political satire though it is right on the mark and I’d recommend it on that strength alone.

5/10

Populaire

2013-06-01T09:33:00.001+01:00

May contain mild spoilers

Populaire is a French romantic drama set in the late 1950s. It’s a simple, predictable but sweet film about a provincial girl setting out to conquer the world. Small town girl Rose Pamphyle (Déborah François) has dreams of being a typist and one day travels by bus to her nearest town to apply for a job with a local Insurance Man, Louis Échard (Romain Duris). Her lack of style and understanding of metropolitan life as well as general clumsiness make her stand out from the other applicants, but not in the way she hoped. Demonstrations of her speed typing though, peak the interest of her would be boss and he hires her before deciding to train her for speed typing competitions. With a frisson of sexual excitement and the possibility of proving her father wrong, Rose begins to excel in the unusual sport in which she partakes.

It’s obvious to see from the get go, who the target audience for this film is. Shortly before it began, from our usual seats At the Back, my girlfriend whispered in my ear, “Look at all the shiny heads”. It was true that we were the youngest people in the screening by about thirty years. The film has a simplistic charm and the sort of slow, blossoming romance that will appeal more to the older generation than to those of us with our own teeth and you can tell from the very first scenes exactly where it’s going and what will happen but sometimes it’s nice to get that from a film. Occasionally I don’t mind the odd ‘awww’ moment from a movie but I don’t think Populaire will be popular with all.

To me it felt as though the movie was attempting to cash in slightly on the success of Mad Men. There have been a few TV shows and movies with Man Men-esque style and themes in recent years but this is one of the more overt examples. The men wear sharp suits and drink to excess while the women are attempting to assert a new world order in which they are treated as equals. The heroine spends half of the movie as a feminist, whether she means to or not, but this slides away towards the second half when she becomes a celebrity due to her successes. It felt odd that early scenes were about empowerment and equality but this was just forgotten later on. There were other things which surprised me such as Rose moving in with her handsome boss (albeit in separate rooms). For a small town girl in conservative 1950s France, this felt like an unlikely step. What it allows though is round the clock training and the steady build up of sexual tension.

There was something that slightly spoiled the film for me though it is no fault of the filmmakers. In the UK, before a film we get a title card from the BBFC. This displays the film’s rating, 12A in this case, and briefly outlines why the film got that particular rating. For example before an 18 rated film the frame might read something along the lines of “Strong bloody violence from the start, moderate drug use and scenes of a sexual nature”. It’s something that is relatively new to British cinemas. The problem is though that it occasionally creates spoilers. Here for example, the caption read “Contains one moderate sex scene”. Because of this, I knew before the film started that the couple would get together and that there would be a sex scene. Populaire isn’t the sort of film that will surprise you with its plot but it’s nice not to know what will happen and how many times before you see a movie. The worst example of the BBFC fluffing up a film incidentally was one in which the caption read “Contains one scene of a hanging”, so I spent the whole movie trying to work out which character it would be.

As I said in my opening, Populaire is a sweet film. You could argue that it is occasionally a little too sweet but I was happy to go with it. It’s the perfect date movie for adults who aren’t interested in exploding cars or wise-cracking super heroes. Both leads are good and very watchable but didn’t impress me so much that I feel the need to write at length. Déborah François has an innocence about her but the sort of innocence which you can tell is on the cusp of exploration. She is cute and adorable and to me looked a lot like English actress Gemma Arterton. She portrays the journey to adulthood well and looks both sweet and funny when typing away with her two outstretched fingers. Romain Duris is charming and handsome and I bought his coach/mentor role. To be honest, he didn’t have an awful lot to do but he had great chemistry with François. Bérénice Bejo has a small but important role but like Duris, isn’t given much to do with it. I’d have liked to have seen more of her. Acting wise. OK, everything wise. Mélanie Bernier plays the perfect bitch in her scenes.

The film looks great and has an authentic period feel. It also manages to make the ‘sport’ of speed typing exciting and dramatic. It uses split screen and fancy reverse close ups of the typewriters to get the audience ‘close to the action’ and it ramps up the sound of the keys to aid the tension. It’s a very well choreographed film, from the typing to dancing to sex scene, which is beautifully done. The scene takes place in a darkened room with a flashing light outside. The light switches between red and blue, illuminating the two bodies in frequently changing colour. It looks spectacular. There is also a delightful title sequence which is reminiscent of those made famous in films of the period. The orange, cream, blue and green colour palate looks great and there’s a perfect font and really good animation. The costume design, as I’ve already mentioned, is spot on.

In the end Populaire isn’t going to surprise you. What it lacks in twists and reveals it makes up for in its sweet telling of a traditional romantic story. The leads are fine and the era is visually pleasing but it won’t stay in the memory for long. It somehow makes speed typing exciting and entertaining and balances fun and social commentary well but don’t expect anything groundbreakingly original.

6/10

GFR 7/10

True Romance

2013-05-30T20:45:00.003+01:00

Despite initial commercial failure, True Romance’s strong performances and savvy script have made it a cult classic. Written by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery before the release of Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino once intended to direct the film too but eventually sold the script after losing interest. Tony Scott took over in the director’s chair and threw out Tarantino’s non-linear storyline in favour of a more traditional linear approach but the bulk of Tarantino’s story remained. The film features a central love story which gets tangled up in the worlds of drugs, organised crime and Hollywood before untangling itself in a hail of bullets following a very Tarantino-esque Mexican Standoff.

The movie is famous for its cast which rivals any in cinema history. Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette star as the young couple who find love at a triple bill Kung Fu movie night but are joined on screen by a vast array of the great and good of their profession. Names and faces recognisable to all include Michael Rapaport, Dennis Hopper, Brad Pitt, Samuel L. Jackson, James Gandolfini, Gary Oldman, Val Kilmer, Chris Penn, Tom Sizemore, Victor Argo and Christopher Walken. I’m struggling to think of any cast which matches the one assembled here and if you have a suggestion, I’d love to hear it.

As with pretty much anything Quentin Tarantino has written, I was a big fan of the script. What I liked though was something which isn’t so prevalent in his latter work. Tarantino always creates great scenes and dialogue which could melt steel but here you can really see the writer’s craft at work. It’s easy to imagine the process behind the writing and if anything it makes him more accessible as a writer. I don’t think the script is as deeply woven as some of his later films. It’s barer, open for all to see but it’s no less interesting. The script is also fairly traditional too. There are inventive characters and situations but it feels more restrained than something like Kill Bill or Django Unchained. The scene which is always picked up on is ‘the Sicilian Scene’. This is a fantastic piece of cinema with great writing and acting but personally I prefer the scene in which James Gandolfini’s Mafioso gets Patricia Arquette’s Alabama alone in the hotel room. His terrifying performance and menace works brilliantly against her coy yet intelligent response to the questioning and beating which she is given. Her refusal to give in or give up not only shows the strength of her character but also how much the money means to the couple as well as highlighting her love of and faith in her lover.

There are wonderful acting performances dotted throughout True Romance and it’s difficult to pick any out but for me three do stand out above the rest. Firstly there is Patricia Arquette who plays with her beauty and accent to create a character that it is easy to judge but will always surprise you. Her almost childlike excitement is also a welcome rest bite from the danger and violence which accompanies the film. I thought that Christopher Walken was excellent in his short scene. His facial expressions when listening to Denis Hopper are extraordinary. Standing out above everyone else though is Gary Oldman. Not only is his performance the best in the film but it’s amongst the best I think I’ve ever seen. He is probably only on screen for about six or seven minutes but is so memorable that I remembered him above all else from my only other viewing of the movie about a decade ago. He is unrecognisable as drug dealing pimp Drexl Spivey and delivers cutting lines behind a convincing accent. To see him in a film like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and then in this, you’d be forgiven for thinking it wasn’t the same man. Although I’ve picked out those three actors, there are several who are excellent and one of the strengths of the film is that it isn’t afraid to feature a great actor for just a few minutes and then maybe kill them off or just have them disappear from the story altogether.

Tony Scott provides a steady hand as director but I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t want to see Tarantino’s version. What Scott does though is put a complex story with lots of characters together very well and despite some quick cutting towards the climax which wasn’t to my liking, I thought he did a fine job. One scene in particular caught my eye and involved the opening of cases and loading of guns. It was a neat little scene though I think praise also has to go to Editor Michael Tronick. I also loved the slowly settling feathers in the final shootout. It was both over the top and beautiful. Hanz Zimmer’s score is based on Carl Orff’s Grassenhaur and the same few notes accompany the film from beginning to end. It’s simple but effective. True Romance is an ultra cool crime thriller with enough stars to fill a cinema for weeks and a script to die for. It’s entertaining, well acted and has a high re-watchability factor. There’s little I can fault with its construction or its presentation and I look forward to watching it again and again.

8/10

Titbits

Tarantino sold the script for just $10,000. It was part of a much larger screenplay, one half of which went into making Natural Born Killers.
The film bombed on it's release, making just $12 million from a $13 million budget.
The film features 21 on screen deaths and 226 uses of the word fuck, fucking or fucked.

Destry Rides Again

2013-05-29T09:55:00.001+01:00

This 1939 Western is one of several produced around the Destry character of the 1932 novel. This version is only loosely based on the novel though, with many characters and events differing significantly. In the fictional Western town of Bottleneck, saloon owner Kent (Brian Donlevy) reigns supreme. With the help of saloon singer Frenchie (Marlene Dietrich) the town is under his control through fear, intimidation and extortion. A series of Sheriffs come and go with the latest being shot by Kent himself. In order to avoid the unwanted attention of the law, Kent and his Mayor (Samuel S. Hinds) give the job to one of the town’s many drunks, Washington Dimsdale (Charlie Winniger). ‘Wash’ surprises the town though by cleaning up his act and hiring a new Deputy from Montana. The son of a once feared lawman, Destry (James Stewart) turns out to be a disappointment. Against guns and seeming a bit of a wimp, Destry hides behind his polite exterior, a man willing to uphold the law, whatever it takes.

Destry Rides Again pulled me in two directions. Occasionally I thought the film was far too broad and frothy, full of poor jokes and songs but every now and then it surprised me with a cutting line, wonderful metaphor or ferocious fight which gave me the impression of watching two films accidently cut together as one.

I found the humour of the film worked against its overall goals and definitely interrupted my enjoyment. The frequent gurning reminded me of the sort of acting you’d find from bit part players behind Charlie Chaplin in the middle teens of the last century. Maybe it’s just that the comedy has aged but I found very little of it funny. What was better than the front and centre jokes were the ones which slipped under the radar slightly. The more subtle comedy worked far better here than the more broad, loud stuff. Something else which I wasn’t keen on were the songs. I don’t like the sound of Marlene Dietrich’s singing voice. It sounds a couple of octaves too low for her body and reminded me of football chanting. That being said, there was one song in the film which kept repeating in my head as I tried to sleep last night. The song was Little Joe, the Wrangler and it had an incredibly catchy rhythm to it. It also closes the film, sung by some children at the end.

I enjoyed the plot much more than I did the songs and comedy. It’s basically a classic sheriffs and outlaws tale only with the outlaws running the town and the sheriffs riding in to take it. The way in which Jimmy Stewart’s Destry goes about cleaning up Bottleneck is very different to your typical cowboy film. His early scenes make him a laughing stock and his gentle tones and upstanding gait give him the look of a college student who got off the wagon at the wrong stop. What he initially hides though is supreme intelligence and understanding of how things work Out West. He draws the bad guys in close before striking and often does so without the use of weapons.

I was impressed in the early stages with the film’s anti gun stance. For a movie made in a country which is strangled by an irremovable law allowing anyone to own a firearm, the anti firearm stance of the central character was a welcome change from the norm. While this is kept up for most of the film, a turning point in the plot sees Destry heading for his shooting irons before a final climactic shootout. This was a shame but the movie redeemed itself by making the women of Bottleneck the true heroes and they used no guns at all. In the face of the American right’s ridiculous suggestion that if everyone was armed then there would be no gun crime, I found Destry’s line “You see if I woulda had a gun then, why, one of us might have been hurt and it might be me. I wouldn't want that to happen... would I?” to be of particular significance.

For a film produced under the strict Motion Picture (Hays) Code, I was a little surprised by a couple of the scenes. The Code era censors were renowned for cutting seemingly innocuous scenes from movies but a couple seemed to have escaped their gaze here. Marlene Dietrich is seen changing her clothes in one scene and when down to her undergarments, straddles a stool. While tame by modern standards, this sort of saucy image was the sort of thing I’d have expected the censors to remove. A vicious catfight was also included. This fight, between Dietrich and Una Merkel lasted a couple of minutes and ended with the two women’s clothes in tatters. Dietrich in particular appeared to go all out in the fight.

The acting was a real mixed bag. There were a lot of actors, mainly those with more comedic roles whose performances I could have done without. Billy Gilbert is one example of an actor who is on hand purely to provide laughs but fails to do so. Marlene Dietrich is pretty good as the seductive tease of the saloon and she shares some nice scenes with James Stewart who is the stand out. His affable and gentle personality is really suited to the role and the metaphorical dialogue comes straight off his tongue with great style. Mischa Auer is one of the few actors in a comedic role who shines and I was also impressed with Jack Carson and Irene Hervey. Brian Donlevy appears to be acting in a film made fifteen years earlier but is fine as the villain.

In the end there are areas of Destry Rides Again which I really enjoyed. The plot whizzes along and the dialogue is snappy but I couldn’t help but feel the tone was just too light.

5/10

Titbits

Dietrich and Stewart had a famous affair while making the film and it is heavily rumoured that following the production, Dietrich had an abortion without Stewart's knowledge.
This was Stewart's first Western. He wouldn't return to the genre for another eleven years.
The famous fight scene was un-choreographed and the actresses agreed that anything went except closed fists. Dietrich was bruised for weeks following the scene but the Director got it in one take.