Rio Rancho Film Reviews

Midnight in Paris

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:30:00 +0000

Why do I keep allowing Woody Allen to do this to me? Time after time I allow myself to get suckered by good reviews and loose talk of a return to form. It’s like I never learnt anything from Match Point. Woody isn’t a complete spent force (I enjoyed some of Melinda and Melinda and Whatever Works raised a few simple chuckles), but you can’t compare any of his recent work to the likes of Manhattan and Crimes and Misdemeanors. And the fact that Midnight in Paris got nominated for Best Picture is pure insanity. Apparently some directors just have to take a crap on the screen to get nominated while others can produce the best work of their life and get silently shafted.

You could argue that the beginning of Midnight in Paris, with a couple of minutes of shots of the spectacular French capital, is a companion piece to the beginning of Manhattan. It’s almost something of a love note. But while Manhattan had a breathless beginning, full of wit and poetry and spectacular photography, this is just a tourist’s view of the city. There’s no real insight. It’s merely an uninspired visual roll call of Paris’ most famous spots.

This tourist’s eye view of a major European city is something that plagued Match Point. You never really felt that Woody knew London. It felt completely at odds with his insider view of New York. And this feeling stretches to Paris. I don’t doubt that he’s visited the city a great many times, but the whole film is a bland kind of touristy wish-fulfillment. Beneath the central conceit of the movie (Owen Wilson, after midnight, can go back in time), there isn’t a thought deeper than, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to go back in time and hang out with Ernest Hemingway and F.Scott Fitzgerald for a while...’

Call me crazy, but I expect something with a bit more substance than that when it comes to Best Picture nominees. And most criminal of all, for an Allen comedy, it’s not even that funny. Owen Wilson just lumbers around, doing a sub-par Woody Allen impression.

The only time that the film came close to making me laugh was during the scenes with Michael Sheen. Drunk with his own bullshit, Sheen plays a pretentious, pseudo-intellectual twit who undermines Gil (Wilson) at every turn. He’s so casually rude and tactless that he’s borderline sociopathic. Yet for some reason Gil’s fiance adores this nincompoop.

You know that Gil’s fiance is worthless because everything she wears has some sort of denim. Here she is in Paris, one of the most beautiful, chic cities in the world and she’s wearing a denim dress. How pathetically American of her. Oh, and she has neo-conservative parents.

I can see why Allen makes everyone so risible. He wants us to fall in line and stick rigidly behind Gil. But the characters are so overwhelmingly cartoonish that I couldn’t believe in them.

Firstly, I can’t believe that such conservative parents would want to spend any time in Paris, even if it was just for some business. Surely, given all the ridiculous hatred towards the French (hand me some Freedom Fries!), this should be the last place they would want to be. Secondly, what is Gil doing with such a wretched woman? His fiance talks down to him, she dismisses him at every turn and she’s clearly having an affair with Michael Sheen. The fact that Gil would stay with this woman, and consider marrying her, reflects very poorly on him. He’s an idiot for associating with these people.

But of course, the fact that his present day life is so dismal is meant to make the trip back in time all that much sweeter. It’s part of the whole ‘golden age thinking’ theory that’s presented. Almost everyone is disappointed with the present. Most people think that everything was better at a certain point in the past. It’s the one interesting thought that the film has.

Being even more of a slave to golden age thinking than most, Gil is delighted to be whisked away to a Paris where Hemingway, F.Scott Fitzgerald and Picasso are roaming the streets. But the character is such a fanboy, and has so little to say, that all of his encounters are nothing more than a painfully shallow fawning. There’s so little meat in this film, it’s incredible. It’s like Allen never managed to get beyond the concept.

One of the few things that I could connect to was Gil’s love of city life. He argues that no writer or painter or musician is ever going to create something that’s going to compete with a great city - each corner and each street is its own special art form. And I kind of agree. No film, no book and no piece of music can compete with my beloved London. They just can’t get close.

Eventually Gil recognises the flaw in his thinking and decides to return to the present forever. But this is only because Adriana (Marion Cotillard), the object of his affection, finds a portal to yet another part of Paris’s past. She wants to live in the Belle Epoque. Aghast that she wants to live in a time without penicillin, they go their separate ways.

With this disappointment, Gil finally realises the futility of nostalgia. Yes the present might be painful and unsatisfactory, but such is life. No matter where we are, most of us are destined to want more. It’s human nature. But any depth or melancholy is eschewed for a standard Hollywood ending. Gil breaks up with his horrible fiance and then bumps into a girl he met earlier - a girl who sells antiques at a local market. Of course, the girl is incredibly young and very attractive and they both remark upon how they love Paris in the rain. They then walk off, presumably to enjoy Paris as a couple. The triteness and neatness of this is the final nail in the coffin of a horribly mediocre film. I might go and watch Deconstructing Harry to get rid of the stench.

X-Men: First Class

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 20:37:00 +0000

I still have nightmarish flashbacks to my last X-Men experience. I was unemployed and I decided to run some errands. In my foolish enthusiasm to get out of the house, I slammed the door shut without checking to see if I had my keys. I didn’t.

In order to kill time before my wife came home, I decided to go and see X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Fuck me, it was a horrible experience. It was like some deranged monkey had been put in charge of the production and had spent $150 million throwing fecal matter at the screen. I vowed never to watch another X-Men film.

Not that I thought another film would come any time soon. I thought that Wolverine hadn’t made any money and that X-Men would be left alone for a while. But apparently lots of sad, lonely husbands also got locked out of their apartments during that time and went to see that colossal skidmark.

X-Men: First Class didn’t really appear on my radar. When the film came out, I could only think of my cat dragging his dirty bum across the tile floor in the kitchen. The insolent look of disobedience; the furry backside dragging mournfully across the surface with the hind legs terrifyingly immobile; the horrible brown streak circling the dinner table - 20th Century Fox were going to push this on us no matter what; even if the poo on Hugh Jackman’s face hadn’t had time to dry yet.

One of my wife’s little quirks is that she wishes she could deport me and marry James McAvoy instead. With this in mind, there wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to get away with not watching First Class.

The first thing that struck me when watching the film: it’s actually quite good. Sure it’s a little odd to hear Kevin Bacon speaking pretty good German, but it had a strong start.

The movie begins with a young Erik (who’ll later become Magneto) being separated from his parents in a Nazi concentration camp. Distraught, he manages to bend some metal gates with the power of his mind. Seizing on this, Dr Schmidt (Bacon), later to be called Sebastian Shaw, tries to get the kid to move a coin for him. The kid tries and tries, but he’s unable to move it - the coin stays stubbornly motionless. Feeling that the kid perhaps needs a little more motivation, he brings the child’s mother into the room. Schmidt says that the boy has until the count of three to move the coin or he’ll shoot the boy’s mother. Erik tries even harder but he still can’t do it. True to his word, upon the count of three, Schmidt shoots Erik’s mother dead. Finally the boy is able to move the coin - his powers are fuelled by his rage.

What surprised me about this scene is just how grim it is. There’s an incredible amount of tension and the violence is shockingly strong for a PG-13. It’s nice to see a comic book movie that doesn’t hold back.

Better is yet to come. Erik, now grown up and played by the omnipresent Michael Fassbender, decides to track down Dr Schmidt so that he can avenge the death of his mother. Here the film becomes something of a Bond movie. Erik slowly draws closer to Schmidt/Shaw and assassinates anyone who gets in the way. There’s a fabulous scene where Erik uses his powers to kill a couple of ex Nazis who are hiding in Argentina. At one point he uses his magnetic powers to pin a man’s hand to a table with a knife. He doesn’t even have to touch the blade.

What makes this even more enjoyable is the over-the-top music that plays. When Erik’s in 007 mode, he has this brilliant piece of theme music that accompanies him. It’s kind of like a mixture of the James Bond theme and the rattling guitar piece from Once Upon a Time in the West. It gives the character a level of cool that far exceeds anything in the previous X-Men movies.

Once Erik meets up with Charles Xavier (James MacAvoy) the movie becomes a little less fun. It’s still leagues ahead of anything else in the X-Men franchise, but the movie can’t quite maintain the heights of the opening thirty minutes.

One of First Class’s major problems is that the supporting characters are universally dull. The mutant kids that Xavier tracks down are fairly appalling and every time they’re on the screen, the film drags. None of the kids have got any serious acting chops and all of their special skills are underwhelming. There’s a kid who can fire raw bolts of energy, another has wings like a fairy, another can scream at such a pitch that he can fly at supersonic speeds and there’s even a boffin with prehensile feet. There’s also a kid called Darwin, who can adapt to any situation - at one point he sticks his head in a tank of water and develops gills. But the character’s only purpose in the film is to die. He’s the sacrificial lamb to prove how ruthless Sebastian Shaw is - Shaw fires raw energy into the kid’s mouth and the kid croaks.

What makes this scene so risible, though, is that Darwin is one of the only black characters (the other is a stripper). At one point Shaw even makes a speech about slavery and the camera stops right on the black kid. Subtle, no? But of course, the kid is black and therefore he must die.

The most ridiculous part of the film occurs in the final battle between the X-Men and Sebastian Shaw’s Hellfire Club. A large portion of the battle is given to a fight between the evil fairy stripper and the kid who can go supersonic by screaming. The fairy can apparently shoot stuff out of her mouth, which frequently gives us the completely idiotic image of a stripper fairy shooting crap out of her mouth as a spotty kid with flying squirrel wings screams in order to reach supersonic speeds. It’s the worst action scene I’ve seen in years - it’s completely risible.

Thankfully, cut into this nonsense, is the final confrontation between Magneto and Sebastian Shaw. If the film had focused on this entirely, it would have had a much stronger final act. I particularly liked the cold, methodical way that Magneto kills Shaw - with Shaw paralysed by Professor X’s mind control, Magneto, using his powers, slowly moves a coin towards his head. It’s the same coin that Shaw tried to get a young Erik to move when he killed his mother. The coin slowly floats towards Shaw’s head and then enters it, eventually passing through the other side. The younger Erik would have had this coin go through Shaw like a bullet, but the older, wiser and more ruthless Erik takes his time so that he can enjoy Shaw’s death.

One strange thing about the ending of the film is that Michael Fassbender, having now become Magneto, starts talking in a thick Irish accent. Throughout the rest of the film his accent is fairly neutral. Was this the first day of shooting or is he unable to shout in anything but his native brogue?

And the final shot ensures that the film ends with a damp squib. We finally see Magneto in his full costume. Only the costume looks like he knocked it up at home and his helmet has silly little horns on it. After such a strong beginning and such a shaky final section, First Class was begging for a strong ending. Sadly it doesn’t get it. I couldn’t help but feel they dropped the ball with this one.

Super 8

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 13:41:00 +0000

Super 8 poses as an homage to the Spielberg films of the 70s and 80s. It’s based in a small town, focuses on a group of precocious children and the military are bogeymen not to be trusted. But in the end, the film goes its own way.

There was always a clarity about those early Spielberg films. We knew who the heroes and villains were. But Super 8 is a little bit muddier. And not in a complex, thought-provoking way. Sometimes it’s just needlessly violent and cruel.

The main problem is the alien life form at the center of the film. Tortured and abused by the military, it turns homicidal in its attempt to return home. Very rarely do we actually see any bloodletting but innocent people get thrown around like rag dolls and at one point someone gets eaten. Despite this, we’re still meant to sympathise with this being.

Yes it must be horrible to be incarcerated and to be tortured and to be prevented from returning home, like so much Guantanamo Bay, but that doesn’t mean you should go around collecting people to eat. This shows that you’re an intergalatic dick.

Because of this, the ending to the film falls completely flat. Our hero, Joe, is about to be munched on by this massive alien but the child establishes a telepathic connection with the creature and talks it out of killing him or harming any other people. The boy says that you can still live on after painful events. Wise words, but horribly executed by J.J. Abrams. The alien in this film is seen so seldom and has so little personality or complexity that I didn’t give a damn about his fate. Seriously, after having it lurk in the shadows for the entire running time and have it behave like a psychopath, you’re going to try and invest it with some feeling in the last few minutes? Too little, too late.

It doesn’t help that the creature looks like warmed up leftovers from Cloverfield. How am I meant to feel for a gigantic space spider? Oh, I know how. Right at the last second Abrams’ will suddenly give the creature big, round human-like eyes. Sorry J.J., your creature is still a poorly conceived, barely-adequately-rendered jerk.

With the alien being such a bust, it’s a shame that the rest of Super 8 is pretty good. The relationships between the child characters have a lot of warmth and colour, and the movie is impressively shot.

Super 8 deliberately steals a lot of its visuals from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The lens flares, the colours and the compositions are very reminiscent of Spielberg’s film.

Some of the action is also lifted from Spielberg. The scene where an electrician gets snatched by the alien feels like something out of Jurassic Park. But even though it feels like an homage, it’s still well executed.

A much more fanciful sequence is the train crash near the beginning of the film. The accident seems to last for several minutes and the CGI isn’t always convincing. Plus there’s some supreme silliness at the end when a man in a truck - a man who drove headfirst into the massive train - survives the crash. Only the back of the truck is destroyed and the man is still well enough to wave a gun around. In a film that has a massive spider alien, this is the element that stretches credibility the furthest.

The only reason that the film recovers from this nonsense is that it has genuine affection for its human characters. The kids have great chemistry and there’s that feeling of innocence and playfulness that you got from those old Spielberg movies. It seems like something special might happen. But then the alien story kicks in and everything unravels. It seemed to me that Abrams didn’t know how to tie everything together. He has the skill to create a wonderful looking film and he has the skill to create likeable characters, but he can’t knit it into one piece.

Later in the film, the violence seems incredibly brutal for what is essentially a family film. Our young heroes get to witness an alien violently ripping military men to shreds. Is the fact that the military men are murderers enough to justify the verocity of the scene? Supposedly it is, but if this were real life, I’m sure these kids would be scarred for decades.

But it’s just strange that such violence co-exists in a film which is essentially about children slowly shedding their innocence. One could argue that the violence is real life creeping in and turning these young people into adults, but some of it is pretty extreme for a PG-13.

I also hated the way that the lead character lets go of his necklace at the end. The necklace contains a locket with a picture of himself as a baby with his dead mother (she dies in an industrial accident when the film begins). It’s meant to symbolise the boy letting go of the past but it didn’t work for me. We shouldn’t let the past rule our lives but at the same time we should honour the memory of those we love. The boy letting the bracelet go made it seem like he’d gotten over his mother’s death too easily. It almost felt uncaring. This is certainly not how the scene was intended, but there was no arc to the boy’s grief. He was sad and then he got over it - there was no progression. If it were me in the same situation, the picture would have to be ripped from my hands, even if I’d had it for decades.

And this is why the movie failed. It didn’t earn the sentiment. Spielberg earned it, but Abrams most certainly didn’t.

Hanna

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:45:00 +0000

Ever wondered what a British arthouse action film would feel like? Wait no more, for we have Hanna, possibly one of the most peculiar action films ever made.

There’s nothing particularly original in this movie. Thrown in some Bourne Identity, add some La Femme Nikita and sprinkle with everything from Leon to A Clockwork Orange to Mission: Impossible to Batman Begins to the James Bond movies to Grimms’ fairytales. This is a film with lots of influences.

Sadly, Hanna doesn’t rise beyond its ambitions. It desperately wants to be an arthouse actioner. It wants to shake the genre up and defy its tired conventions by making a quasi fairytale thriller. But although its beautiful to look at and although its reasonably well acted, it’s also a messy, shallow, cold, sterile, mean-spirited film. I’ve seen a great many movies that are more hard-edged than this but few have felt so grubby.

Violence in films rarely bothers me but here it’s particularly manipulative and pointless. It doesn’t advance the story and it doesn’t really tell us anything about the characters. People are tortured and stabbed and shot just to keep us on our toes and to show that the characters committing the acts are badasses that aren’t to be messed with. Cate Blanchett shoots a defenceless old lady, Tom Hollander stabs an Arab in the neck, Eric Bana kills a couple of cops etc. etc.

The scene with the old lady is particularly baffling. You see, Hanna was part of a CIA plan to create genetically altered super soldiers. The plan was a failure and everyone involved was killed. The only people to escape were Hanna and her surrogate father, Erik, played by Eric Bana. Turns out that the old lady is Hanna’s grandmother and she knows all about the secret plan. Quite why she wasn’t rubbed out beforehand, I’m not sure. But killing her now seems particularly stupid. Keep her under surveillance and she might unwittingly lead you to the girl. But no, she’s shot in the head to give the audience a jolt.

Part of the reason that everything is so broad and over the top is that it obviously wants to be a modern day fairytale. Marissa (Cate Blanchett) is the wicked witch/big bad wolf while Hanna is a demented Snow White/Red Riding Hood, living relatively peacefully in her ridiculously idyllic cabin in the woods. But there are no layers to this film. I never really felt that Hanna grew as a character. She started off as a functional psychopath and ended the film slightly less psycho. Indeed, it’s actually annoying that when she eventually says that she no longer wants to kill people - it’s when Cate Blanchett is pointing a gun at her. Now is not the time to find the peace and love in you.

The mid-section of Hanna certainly doesn’t help the film. Hanna gets taken in by a hippie family that seem more dysfunctional than Hanna and her surrogate father (note: Hanna and her father randomly fight in the middle of night to test Hanna’s combat readiness). These hippies argue and twitter on about a load of nonsense. Joe Wright is trying to make them seem like a believably complex family unit, but they come over as cliches. These are the type of people that you would cross the street to avoid if you were holidaying in Europe. And the family’s daughter is repellent. She’s a spoilt little princess who loves to discuss fake boobs and designer bags. Of course there’s meant to be more to her than this - she’s meant to have hidden depths - but I didn’t want Hanna to learn anything from her; I think she’s better off remaining as the Fuhrer’s wet dream (a blonde, Germanic, genetically-enhanced assassin).

And this kills the heart of the film. Through experience and exposure to the beauties of the outside world, Hanna is meant to find her humanity. But what’s out there? Squabbling hippies and posh chavs? Get back to that cabin, Hanna!

I was also disappointed at the failure to flesh out Eric Bana’s character. Effectively, he’s training Hanna to exert revenge on Marissa - Marissa attempted to kill Erik and successfully killed Hanna’s mother. But the character is two dimensional. Plus he’s a key part in two of the film’s hokiest moments.

Hokey Moment Number One: As Hanna’s psycho-Yoda trainer/protector, he decides that the girl is ‘ready’. He then brings out a great big transmitter that will alert the world to their presence. This is really the best way of doing things? Rather than just track down Marissa and quietly rub her out, you’re going to send your ‘daughter’ into the lion’s den? And is it really wise to keep a big transmitter like that lying around? Say you accidentally sat on it in the middle of the night, or Hanna found it and pressed it, or one of your wolf cubs set it off?

Hokey Moment Number Two: Erik is being tracked by government agents. They confront him in a subway station. It’s only Erik against four people. Rather than shoot him in the kneecaps with a silenced pistol or just outright shoot him in the head, they decide to take him on in hand-to-hand combat. Of course, even though these guys are well trained, he manages to kill all of them. Idiots.

On the flipside of this, I really enjoyed the flashback where we see Marissa try and assassinate Erik and Hanna’s mother. It has a weird, dreamlike quality to it. It also shows how inept Blanchett’s character is. She tries to stop a car with a Walther PPK! By some miracle she manages to do this and she shoots Hanna’s mum in the head. But even though it’s slightly ridiculous, it works. You get the feeling that this a woman out of her depth but ruthlessly committed to what she’s doing. There’s purpose behind it, which is the polar opposite of the scene with the grandmother.

But although Blanchett is excellent in this scene, she’s pretty lacklustre in the movie as a whole. She chews the scenery like crazy, obviously enjoying the opportunity to play the part of the wicked witch. But there’s nothing subtle about it. There’s even one bit, towards the end, where we see her scowling through the window like she’s literally the Big Bad Wolf. And her American accent is terrible.

However, one detail about Blanchett’s character that I liked: at one point we see a row of dental equipment and then we see Marissa manically cleaning her teeth. She’s cleaning them so hard that her teeth are bleeding. She’s fighting hard to keep her exterior perfect and clean while the inside of her is diseased and rotten. She must remain the fairest of them all, no matter what.

All the Snow White, Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel with guns nonsense concludes with Hanna, an expert assassin, being chased through through a fairytale land by an inept Scary Witch. Really, Hanna should be able to kill her in two seconds, but this would be an anti-climax, so we have a ridiculous face-off where Hanna and Marissa shoot each other (although, to try and make things more creative, Hanna somehow shoots an arrow out of her elbow like she’s MacGuyver). The film ends with a massive whimper.

The one bright spot in this massive folly is Tom Hollander. He’s wonderfully creepy as Isaac, a German killer who has the hair and clothes (although not stature) of a deranged Ken doll. Yes the script doesn’t give his character any depth or complexity, but at least it affords Hollander the chance to show another side of himself. He’s the one positive note in a movie that rings completely hollow.

Drive

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 02:26:00 +0000

A cheesy, synth-heavy song plays over the credits at the end of Drive. With dreamy, hushed sincerity, it proclaims that the central character of the film has proved himself to be a ‘real human being’ and a ‘real hero’. This after we’ve seen him smash heads to smithereens, slap women across the face and blow people away with firearms. He’s neither of these things.

I’m not sure whether the director is taking the piss with this song or whether he’s sincere. Either way it doesn’t really affect my opinion of the film. Whether its a sincere revenge thriller or a snarky, tongue in cheek shoot-’em-up, Drive is gloriously entertaining.

Who’d have thought that a hipster could make such a ruthless killing machine? Because, yes, that’s what Ryan Gosling’s character is. With his vacant eyes, a smile that barely registers on his lips and a toothpick in his mouth, he seems too cool for school. It’s hard to believe that he could muster up enthusiasm for anything. But eventually a few cracks appear.

Robot-hipster Gosling’s world of detached brooding is infiltrated by a pretty neighbour in his apartment building. She has a young son and Gosling immediately takes to them. Pretty soon he’s hanging out in their flat and fixing their car (Gosling plays a mechanic who moonlights as a stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver for criminals). He even manages to produce a smile that shows a couple of teeth.

What I found pleasing about the beginning of the film is that it takes its time. While the atmosphere of the movie is very 80s, the pace in the opening half is very 70s. For a film about driving, no one is in a rush - this movie is going to take the scenic route and try and develop the characters a little bit. Not that there’s really any amazing dialogue in this movie. This is a film more about looks, gestures and atmosphere. Quite often it’s the music that does the talking. And this suits me fine.

What works for me, though, doesn’t work for everyone. In the row ahead of me, I could sense impatience. Indeed, there was even outright mockery. By the time Gosling had coyly grinned for the thirty second time, I could hear sniggers. But then when the second half of the film hit and all hell broke loose, those people quickly shut the fuck up.

But let’s wind back to the beginning of the film. The opening is amazing. Gosling’s character is hired as the getaway driver for an armed robbery. He sets out his terms and then we see him in action. You kind of expect a regular car chase, full of frenzied action. Instead you have a wonderfully tense game of cat and mouse. Gosling doesn’t just hit the accelerator and try and outrun the cops, he uses other cars and underpasses to hide out and he uses his smarts to avoid getting caught. One of the best moments is when he’s face to face with some cops at a traffic light. He has a radio receiver and he knows that he’s been identified. But the cops don’t know that he knows. So Gosling doesn’t crack and only speeds away once the light turns green. It’s really amazing how tense and how thrilling such a minimalist sequence can be.

The only other car chase is more traditional. It’s flat out with screeching tires and twisted metal. But before it can really develop, it’s violently over. It’s a good sequence but it pales beside the opener.

Let’s get back to what it was that shocked people so much. First of all, there was the fact that Christina Hendricks gets shot at point blank range by a shotgun. But the scene that produced audible gasps was the one where Gosling smashes a crook’s hand with a hammer and then threatens to hammer a bullet into his head. At this point all the muttering and snickering was gone. ‘But I thought he was a harmless, borderline retarded hipster!’ you could almost hear them think.

It’s quite an amazing U-turn that the film makes. The film transforms from a sappy indie flick into extreme grindhouse. I mean, in the opening half you’re watching Ryan Gosling seducing Carey Mulligan by driving through storm drains as retro music plays and the sun flares on the camera lens. We’re in 80s romantic movie territory. And then thirty or forty minutes later you’re watching Ryan Gosling literally smashing someone’s head to pieces.

This scene is the most extreme in the movie. But it’s preceded by a long, drippy kiss. You see, some mob guys are after Gosling and one of them gets into the same elevator as Gosling and Mulligan. As a distraction, Gosling kisses Mulligan. The kiss, in slow-motion naturally, goes on for ages. But then when its over, Gosling beats the heavy to death and smashes his face in. By the time he’s stamped on the guy’s head for the tenth time, you think he’s being more than a bit excessive. But then he continues doing it...while his girl backs into the corner. It’s like Dirty Dancing turns into Irreversible. And it’s probably the one scene that doesn’t really work. I kept on thinking that this was a stupid distraction. The mob guy should have just shot him in the back of the head as he was playing tonsil hockey with his wee delicate flower. And what about poor Mulligan? The most romantic moment of her life turns into a horror scene. It’s one thing for a man to protect his woman, but something else to turn a man’s head into pate. You’re going to think twice before you go out on twinkly afternoon drives with autistic hipsters, aren’t you?

But again, it’s hard to know how to take the scene. Is it being played straight or does it have another intent? Is Gosling being portrayed as a real human being and a real hero, or is he being portrayed as a stone cold psycho? I like the fact that you don’t really know for sure.

A more successful sequence is the hit that Gosling makes on Ron Perlman’s small time crime boss. Perlman has been trying to take Gosling out, so Gosling exacts revenge. Bizarrely scored to an operatic ballad, Perlman parties in his crappy pizzeria with some fellow crooks. Through the glass in the door you see Gosling approach...wearing a rubber mask - the type of mask that stunt drivers wear to look more like the actor they’re doubling for and which also (I think) protect them from fire. It’s a weird, eerie image (he looks like part Octavio the clown in Scarface and part Michael Myers) and I immediately thought that Gosling was going to torch the building with all the crooks in it. Colour me slightly disappointed then when he doesn’t do this.

But then, still wearing the mask, Gosling follows Perlman’s car. He rams into it and then disappears from the scene. Perlman is angry and confused but before he can do anything, Gosling comes back and rams the car off the side of an embankment. Somehow Perlman survives the crash and staggers towards a beach. We then have the eerie image of the masked driver stalking his prey and silently drowning him. It’s like something out of a horror film and it works magnificently.

Have I mentioned yet that the main villain is played by Albert Brooks? This piece of casting works tremendously as you’re certainly not expecting him to stab people to death with forks or bleed people dry with cutthroat razors. But Brooks causes carnage and creates a villain you’re eager to see become the victim of hipstercide. Gosling accommodates him on this point but not before he takes a knife to the gut.

One of the final images of the film is the shadow of the two men stabbing one another. Gosling is perhaps the righteous reflection of this psychopath? This may or may not be true, as both men are almost equally nuts, but the final song certainly wants to point out Gosling’s heroism. ‘You’ve proved yourself to be a real human being and a real hero.’

The end is almost like something out of the TV series of The Incredible Hulk. Carey Mulligan’s world has been turned upside down by a man with no name and then he leaves town to continue his nomadic existence. However, Gosling is too cool to thumb a lift as tearful piano music plays. Instead he roams the lonely highways as some obscure band does a Giorgio Moroder impression. Whose town and whose life will he turn upside down next?

PS - The film deserves extra points for the coolest aerial shots of LA’s skyline and highways since The Rock’s entrance video at No Way Out. (Fuck me, I’m a nerd.)

Mysteries of Lisbon

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 15:05:00 +0000

Last year my wife and I were supposed to see a film called Mysteries of Lisbon at the New York Film Festival. At just over four hours, it’s not surprising that we didn’t make it. A film of this length is a heavy commitment to say the least, especially when you’re surrounded by jumped-up festival goers.

[Cut to a couple of weeks ago]

My wife and I are in Fnac in Portugal. For a while I peruse the CDs and then I decide to look at the movies. Being the stunning intellectual that I am, I decide to try and see what strange titles English-language films have acquired in Portuguese. At the same time, my wife and her cousin are looking at some native films. They stumble upon Mysteries of Lisbon.

The Gorgeous Spouse
Oh, this is the film we were going to see? You remember, at the festival?

Your Fabulous Author
The five hour one?

The Gorgeous Spouse
Yeah. Shall we get it?

Your Fabulous Author
Sure.

[Cut to our living room, a week or so later]

Your Fabulous Author respires gently on the living room sofa. It’s only 10pm, and only twenty minutes of the film have elapsed, but already his lifeforce is seeping from him.

Your Fabulous Author
(Waking from his brief slumber)
Can we watch the rest of this tomorrow?

The Gorgeous Spouse
(Half-asleep herself)
Okay.

Let me put a question to you first. How would you feel if you spent over four hours watching a film and it turned out to be dream or a confused, delirious, untrustworthy remembrance that someone has on the brink of death? Ordinarily, you might have the right to be pissed off, as this is usually one of the least satisfying ways to wrap up a story, but here it actually works. The film is so confused, so incoherent and so self-indulgent that it only makes sense as a dream. If it had ended any other way, I might have hunted down Raul Ruiz so that I could slap him in the face with some bacalhau.

Your Fabulous Author here is talking complete bullshit. He wouldn’t hunt down a 70-year-old cancer survivor so that he could slap him in the face with some bacalhau. He’s not heartless. Besides, he doesn’t have the money for the air fare...

I can think of another four hour plus film, though, that possibly ends with a dream - Once Upon a Time in America. But the difference between the two films is night and day. One of them is a multi-layered, breathtaking meditation on love and time and the other is, well...Mysteries of Lisbon tries hard to be that but it doesn’t succeed.

Ruiz here weaves a tale that goes off in many strange tangents and directions. Stories open within stories and soon this initially simplistic tale leads us into a murky labyrinth. But while it’s an excellent idea (the concept of unravelling the web that leads to a person’s existence), none of the intrigues are especially interesting. A lot of the time the film feels like an expensive soap opera, what with the overwrought emotions, the laughable twists and turns, and the penchant for characters to slap on horribly fake facial hair. Mysteries of Lisbon might have the veneer of an important film, but scratch beneath the surface and there’s not much there.

Your Fabulous Author is watching Mysteries of Lisbon. The second half of the film has just begun. He’s hoping that it’ll be an improvement on the first half - that the film will establish a confident rhythm. Father Dinis is talking to a monk. They chat a little about food and alcohol and...the Monk interrupts the scene to tell his story, marking the umpteenth time that this has happened; that a character has shifted the course of the movie to tell his or her tale.

Your Fabulous Author tugs on his beard and puffs his cheeks, realising that he still has two and a half hours of this nonsense left to go.

One of the most disappointing things about Mysteries of Lisbon is how overwhelmingly bland it is. For a film that is full of so many elegant costumes and sumptuous palaces you never get a real feel for the time or place. This is perhaps partly because all the exteriors feel like they were filmed in one or two places. There’s one piece of forest that I swear is used every time there’s a horse drawn carriage. It becomes almost like Hanna-Barbera - you’re seeing the same tree over and over again. This ends up making such an epic film feel much smaller than it should - it ends up betraying the movie’s TV-mini-series roots.

Again, this wouldn’t really matter if the human drama were up to scratch, but it most certainly isn’t. Whether it’s Father Dinis fighting for Napoleon, or the orphan at the centre of the film finally meeting his mother, or the reemergence of Knife Eater as a wealthy nobleman, it feels contrived and artificial. It’s a movie that’s meant to engage on an intellectual level rather than an emotional one, but it fails in this respect because it just ends up feeling like an art-house version of EastEnders. I mean, a gypsy with really unconvincing facial shrubbery reinvents himself as a priest? Oh, and another geezer with really bad facial hair reinvents himself as a nobleman? There are all kinds of shifting identities in the film but it doesn’t add to the movie in any way - at best it feels like a soap opera; at worst it’s just confusing.

Your Fabulous Author, tired and weary, stretches as the end titles crawl along the screen.

Your Fabulous Author
Well, at least that’s the last that we’ll hear of that piece of crap.

[One week later]

Your Fabulous Author opens ‘Entertainment Weekly’ and sees that Mysteries of Lisbon receives a ‘A’ grade.

Your Fabulous Author
Fuck off!

Your Fabulous Author takes a look at ‘Slant’ and sees a rave.

Your Fabulous Author
Fuck off!!

Your Fabulous Author takes a look at ‘The New York Times’ and sees a glowing review.

Your Fabulous Author
FUCK OFF!!!

Fearing that this is going to be another Russian Ark, a film that everyone seems to jizz themselves over except him, Your Fabulous Author crawls into bed.

Your Fabulous Author
(Voiceover)
Maybe when I wake up, I’ll have turned into my cat Oscar. Then I’ll be incapable of reading any of these deluded reviews. Yeah, that’ll be nice...

Hobo With a Shotgun

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 22:19:00 +0000

Welcome to Hope Town! Or to give it its more appropriate name...Scum Town. This is a city that makes the Old Detroit of RoboCop look like Princeton. A city that makes Mogadishu look like an attractive place to spend your retirement. Hope Town is probably as bad as it gets.

Despite this, an elderly hobo, played by Rutger Hauer, takes up residence in this cesspool. He’s on the streets for no longer than a few minutes when he encounters The Drake (the city’s mob boss) and his two sons, Slick and Ivan, pursuing The Drake’s brother. By using a specially rigged sewer grate, they decapitate The Drake’s brother by pulling his head clean off with a car. Oh, and then an Asian woman in very little clothing dances rhythmically in the fountain of blood that gushes from the freshly made man-geyser. If this doesn’t get your attention, nothing will.

Even though he witnesses this atrocity, the Hobo still harbours dreams of a better life. In a pawn shop window he looks misty eyed at some black and white footage of a 1950s man mowing his lawn. This seems to represent a lost innocence that the Hobo wants to regain and he dreams of purchasing the lawnmower that sits near the TV in the shop window. He only needs $50.

In order to accumulate this money, the Hobo takes to begging on the streets. There’s an amusing scene where he’s trying to write a sign. On the first couple, he lies. He then gives up on this and we see him sitting on the street with a sign that simply says he needs the money so that he can buy a lawnmower. Such sentimentality is completely at odds with this hellish backdrop.

As nasty as the violence is in Hobo With a Shotgun, it’s also incredibly cartoonish. Hammers make feet shatter into bloody pieces and bumper cars make heads explode like they’re watermelons. It isn’t in the least bit realistic. But despite this, the film does have a pervasive grime and grubbiness to it. As ludicrously far-fetched as this world is, it still gets to you. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the film greatly, rocking back and forth in my seat with pleasure as I guzzled the Colt 45 that my friend and I had smuggled into the screening. But the characters are so despicable and the backdrop so depressing that I felt like I needed a bath afterwards.

The ruthlessness of the villains on display here, though, does make the Hobo’s revenge extra enjoyable. I mean, take The Drake. Here’s a guy that decapitates his own brother. He’s also a man who holds torture parties - there’s a scene where some scantily clad women are using a man as a pinata; The Drake, however, brings this to an end with the immortal line ‘When life gives you razor blades...you make a bat, covered in razor blades’ and disembowels the man as the women jump up and down with glee.

Probably worse then The Drake, though, is Slick, The Drake’s son. With a narcissistic smile, slicked back hair and Wayfarers, he’s kind of like a psychotic Tom Cruise. In one hilarious scene, when the Hobo has become a shotgun wielding vigilante, he boards a school bus with his Cristiano Ronaldo lookalie brother Ivan. ‘Disco Inferno’ pumps from a boombox and Slick begins asking the kids questions like he’s Scorpio from Dirty Harry. He asks them if they like ice cream, he asks them if they like school, he asks them if they like bicycles and he asks them if they like hobos. They give each question a resounding yes. We then have a close-up of Slick’s Wayfarers and he says that he hates hobos. He then torches the entire school bus with his flamethrower as ‘Burn, baby, burn’ pounds from the soundtrack, his brother nodding with approval.

Now yes, you might be thinking that I’m a sick bastard for finding amusement in a scene where lots of children are incinerated, but it just flies in the face of what usually happens in films. Children never get hurt. So to see such cartoonish carnage and to see it so gleefully rendered, I couldn’t help but guffaw.

I also have to give Slick credit for referencing the Who song, ‘See Me, Feel Me’ while intimidating a woman. And also for defaming Mother Teresa: ‘Tell it to Mother Teresa while she’s fingerbanging you in hell!’

So what can the Hobo possibly hope to do in the face of such evil? Well, the Hobo holds out for as long as he can. He even debases himself to a Bum Fights-style filmmaker. The guy in question gleefully makes the Hobo eat glass for a few bucks and makes him take the money with his mouth. And Hauer’s acting in this scene is great. Everything is in the eyes - the confusion, the anger and the resignation; he manages to look just like a dog.

Once the Hobo gets to the pawn shop to pick up his lawnmower, it’s overrun by a gang of robbers. They threaten to shoot a baby and the quivering shopkeeper hands over his cash. But its not enough and the criminals become even more desperate. It’s here, with the lawnmower in his hands, that the Hobo sees a shotgun on the wall. Luckily it also costs $50 (and seems to be miraculously full of ammo) and the Hobo blows the thieves away. The choice has been made: the sentimental dreams have been exchanged in favour of grim reality. The Hobo is going to make these criminals pay.

The Hobo works his way through town, killing pimps and scumbags with reckless abandon. Perhaps my favourite slaying is his killing of a paedophile Santa Claus. Santa’s head almost completely explodes. But the Hobo saves the best for Slick. The Hobo kills him by blowing his penis off. A very apt death for a sex-obsessed psychopath who at one point literally saws into the heroine’s neck. This is maybe the Slick’s idea of penetration - to be hacking away at a woman’s flesh.

But it’s both a joyous and a disappointing moment to see Slick get killed. It’s joyous because he’s a fucking punk, but it’s disappointing because he’s such a great antagonist. Every time he’s on the screen, the film is even more despicably entertaining. But in a surreal moment, we get to see Slick carted off to hell in the back of the school bus where he incinerated lots of children.

This moment, however, seems positively normal to what comes later. Enraged by his son’s death, The Drake calls for ‘The Plague’. I can remember at the time asking myself what The Plague was. Well, turns out it’s a pair of armour-clad demons. These guys, dressed like steam-punk assassins on steroids, slaughter an entire hospital-full of people to get to the Hobo. Once they have him, they stick him in a metal coffin and drag him to The Drake on the back of their motorcycles. Oh, and in one scene, we see The Plague fighting a massive pet octopus?!?? Yes, for me, this only adds to the enjoyment of this crazy film.

But just when you think that The Plague is some sort of unbeatable, undead Legion of Doom duo from hell, one of them gets slaughtered by The Hobo’s partner, an armour-clad prostitute called Abby who has a weaponised lawn-mower motor. She uses the motor to kill one half of the duo and then the other half, who kind of resembles a low-rent Doctor Doom, asks her to join him. The Hobo gets involved and says no and the second half of The Plague just walks off. Yep, it’s a weird sequence.

In the same scene, Abby also gets her arm cut off by The Drake and she then begins stabbing him with the exposed bone. How the hell can this film possibly end, you think? Well, the Hobo kills The Drake and then the cops kill the Hobo. But then the cops end up getting slaughtered by the general populace. The final shot is of the shotgun on the floor.

What to take from this film? I’m not sure how much political or social commentary there is here. It’s certainly not on par with RoboCop. But maybe its a criticism of a society that has become so desensitised that it is literally amusing itself to death.

Maybe it’s also playing on our fear of the poor. Part of the story involves The Drake forcing the general populace to kill every hobo in town, otherwise he’ll make everyone suffer. The people are easily intimidated and do The Drake’s biding. Unfortunately, this is pretty close to reality. Politicians and media outlets are always playing on the people’s fears and the poor are an especially easy target. People certainly hate the poor more they should and hate the rich less - the rich deserve far more contempt than they receive.

But the greater, albeit more shallow, joy to take from Hobo is in how well filmed it is. For such a cheap film, it’s looks wonderful. There are some great shots and the use of colour in some scenes kind of reminded me of Dick Tracy. And in a couple of moments the film succeeds in actually being a little creepy. There’s a scene where the Hobo is in a police station talking to the Chief of Police and you cut to a shot of Ivan’s grinning mug as he slowly slinks into the room. The colour, the composition and Ivan’s smug smile make it a weirdly memorable visual.

In such a brutal film the two protagonists are also pleasingly sympathetic and likeable. Yes the Hobo is clearly bonkers, going on as he does about bears and talking to his brain, and yes Abby is a cliched hooker with a heart of gold, but they’re two bright sparks in a sea of shit. And with their silly dream of opening a lawnmower business (‘You grow it, we cut it!’) they remind you that mankind isn’t totally fucked. While we still have the power to have sentimental dreams, while we still have the ability to empathise with other people and while we can still summon an appropriate level of outrage at the degradation of those weaker than us, we’re still human...even if we need a huge shotgun to express it.

Directed by Jason Eisener
Written by John Davies
Produced by Rob Cotterill, Niv Fichman, Paul Gross and Frank Siracusa
Original Music by Adam Burke, Darius Holbert and Russ Howard III
Cinematography by Karim Hussain
Starring Rutger Hauer, Brian Downey, Gregory Smith and Molly Dunsworth

Running Time: 86 mins

Frozen

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 19:40:00 +0000

What a great concept for a movie. We’ll take three obnoxious bozos, stick them on a ski lift and then have them get stuck on there with no one to help. We’ll even have a storm...and maybe some wolves. Yeah, that’ll be great!

It’s part of my peculiar nature to find a premise like this intriguing. How the hell do you generate drama with three people stuck on a ski lift?. I have no idea, but if it involves pain, degradation and broken limbs, I’m up for it.

I’m not sure if we’re supposed to sympathize with the grabass-tic amphibian shit on display here, but I despised them from the get-go. We have an airhead girl, her annoying, sleazebag boyfriend and their equally sleazy friend. They’re the kind of over-privileged, cheap-ass people that won’t pay full price for a ski ticket but at the same time are so out of touch with reality that they think that minimum wage is called minimal wage. These dickheads have led lives that are far too comfortable.

You know that these people have never done a real day’s work in their lives or ever struggled for anything. How do I know this? Because one of the guys, Dan, spends all of his time wearing a ridiculous white woolly hat. He even wears it indoors when he’s eating. Yeah, anyone who brazenly wears a tea cosy on their head all day long, a tea cosy that makes their head look four times the size it really is, has never experienced any true pain. The only conflict they experience is deciding what porno video they should masturbate to or what shitty-ass band they should cram into their fucking iphone 4 (hmm, Drowning Pool or Rev Theory?). These people need a harsh dose of reality.

Reality rears its ugly head when they decide to do some night skiing. It’s pitch black but they somehow manage to talk their way onto the ski lift. No one else is being taken to the top but this doesn’t dissuade them. They continue to talk inane, asinine bullshit. Little do they know, though, that down below there are staffing issues. The lift operator is called away to talk to his boss and his replacement doesn’t realize that there are three people heading for the top. So the lift’s turned off.

The three hateful turds are stuck on the lift for no longer than, ooh, ten seconds before they start discussing the worst way to die. Tea cosy twat-face Dan thinks that it would be especially bad to be eaten by a shark. His idiotic friend, meanwhile, thinks that the girl on the Jaws poster is hot. ‘Naked chicks are hot.’ Why didn’t they just have a scene where the tosser pulled his shrivelled little member out and talked with it? ‘Naked chicks are hot. Blah, blah, blah! Tits, tits, tits! I never get any. I’m so sad! What did I do to deserve being stuck with this douchebag for eternity?’

But although the film references Jaws, it more closely resembles Open Water. However, Open Water was a pretty decent film. This, though, is atrocious. Sure there’s joy to be found in it. Mainly the joy of watching smug twenty-somethings getting eaten by wolves. But it’s a pretty feeble piece of writing and filmmaking.

To illustrate the level of writing on display here, there’s a scene where the girl starts telling everyone how much she needs to pee. Okay, this is a real concern if you’re trapped somewhere for a length of time. But the girl sounds so pathetic - so babyish and whinny. Plus she also actually says the following line: ‘I need to pee...wicked bad.’ That line probably got the biggest laugh out of me in the entire film. More even than the bit where tea cosy guy gets eaten by wolves.

Yeah, you heard me right, tea cosy guy gets eaten. He decides to be a hero and jumps off the ski lift. Only problem is that he’s a long way from the ground and breaks both of his legs. We see the bone sticking through his twisted limbs and he screams his head off. But the fucking tea cosy on his head remains stubbornly in place.

The effects for this horrible injury are pretty terrible. There’s a bit where he’s lying there in the snow and it looks like his head is poking through a trapdoor and that the body and legs are cheap prosthetics. The crunching of broken bones and squelching noises are also incredibly phony. Plus this injury does a very strange thing and actually makes Dan sound retarded. I know that pain can do lots of things to people, but there’s a moment where it actually sounds like his brain has been stabbed. ‘Mmmsdfsdf sdffsdfs legggssss huuurrrrtttt!’

The reward of all this is getting to watch Dan get eaten. Eventually he attracts the attention of a pack of wolves. At first the wolves are easily scared away but after a while they’re not so easily deterred. And there’s a brilliant moment, right before he gets devoured, where Dan draws his tea cosy over his face. Yeah, cover your bulbous bonce with that fucking thing. Make sure that the wolves don’t have to look at your annoying face when they’re tearing into your flesh. Although, having said this, I do wish that one of the wolves would have removed the hat with its paw and slapped him in the face with it...

Of course, Dan’s girlfriend and their toolish friend Lynch get to hear Dan’s screams. And Dan even manages to order his girlfriend not to look at the wolves when they’re having their elevenses. ‘Don’t let her look!’ he screams to Lynch. Oh, what a great guy! What a hero!

The range of emotions that follow this are both cringe-worthy and hilarious. Lynch and the girlfriend argue at first and then they console each other with hugs. Aww, bless. But Lynch is such a sleazebag that I was half-expecting him to ask her for a hand-job or something. ‘Go on, just a little one.’ Thankfully, this doesn’t happen, but then in an arse-puckering attempt to generate sympathy or emotion, the girl says how she has a puppy at home. But if she’s not home to take care of the puppy, the puppy is going to starve to death. But worse than this, the puppy is going to think it was abandoned. Really, you go to a ski slope to spend all day snowboarding and you don’t tell a neighbour or a friend to look after your dog for the day? It’s not a fucking cat - isn’t it going to just piss and shit everywhere and eat your sofa? Maybe if you told someone where you were going, you wouldn’t have to worry about your puppy eating its paws while crying its eyes out and whimpering, ‘I thought she loved me.’

Other humiliations follow. The girl falls asleep and gets her hand stuck to the ski lift rail and then later she pisses herself. This latter moment is especially mirthful because the flow of urine is immediately followed by a swelling orchestra. Is this meant to be a grand, emotional moment? Is this her nadir? This is worse than her boyfriend getting eaten by wolves?

More poorly conceived character development takes place and Lynch tells the girl how he once thought he’d met ‘the one’. Like him, she was also into Aerosmith! Please, wolves eat this bastard!

Thankfully, the wolves comply. You see, Lynch manages to pull some James Bond shit and climbs the ski lift wire hand over hand until he gets to a support pole - a pole that has a ladder on it. But no sooner has Lynch reached terra firma than some wolves have jumped on him and are having another snack.

This leaves just the girl. By some quirk of fate, the ski lift come crashing to the ground and she makes a bid for freedom. However, before she reaches the bottom of the slope, she stumbles upon the wolves feasting on Lynch. She backs away and eventually manages to reach the road. Brilliant! Her puppy now is not going to eat its own head! And everyone lives happily ever after...

...Except the girl then hears the voice of her boyfriend echo in her head. ‘You’re going to be okay, baby.’ And then hilariously, even though it appeared at the beginning of the film, the title ‘Frozen’ snaps onto the screen in huge letters. It’s meant to be a final punch in the face. ‘Take that - take my heavy-hitting film and try and digest it and then shit yourself because it was so traumatizing.’ But Frozen isn’t traumatizing. It’s a walk in the park.

Directed and Written by Adam Green
Produced by Peter Block and Cory Neal
Original Music by Andy Garfield
Cinematography by Will Barratt
Starring Emma Bell, Shawn Ashmore and Kevin Zegers

Running Time: 93 mins

Rated R for some disturbing images, including men beating eaten by wolves and a fucktard wearing a tea cosy

Cliffhanger

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 03:22:00 +0000

The opening to Cliffhanger is meant to be a harrowing experience. We're meant to feel enormous sorrow and pity as an innocent woman plunges to her horrible death. But how can we experience any kind of horror when Frank, a helicopter pilot played by Ralph Waite out of The Waltons, is in the background cackling with laughter? Just watch him. His eyes sparkle when Stallone tells the distressed woman that she's not doing to die. And he collapses in near hysterics when she falls but a few seconds later, obviously finding some kind of sick humour at the thought of the girl being smashed to pieces on the rocks, thousands of feet below. Contrast this with Michael Rooker's overacting – he almost faints as if he’s in a Jane Austen novel when he sees the girl plummet – and you have a scene that is tailor-made for chortles rather than gasps.

But to be fair to Stallone and the girl, they carry themselves pretty well in the scene. The girl pleads and pleads, and Stallone gamely hangs on. And the situation itself is excellent – huge drop, cracked harness, burly, lazy-mouthed actor trying to hang on to a hysterical woman who won’t shut the fuck up. But whenever I watch it, I can only see Frank's huge grin, his glowing eyes and him hooting in the background as Michael Rooker’s world falls apart. What exactly does Frank find so funny? Is he an evil old buzzard or has senility stalked its way into his spongy old brain? In his advanced years, does he think that the woman will be caught by kittens and rocketed to Valhalla in a chariot driven by mohawked-squirrels wearing diamond-encrusted strap-ons that spurt single-malt whisky? Or does he just not give a shit? Who the fuck knows...

However, as inappropriate as it is, Frank’s laughter isn’t entirely out of place. Nope, laughter is a common reaction when watching Cliffhanger. This isn’t to say that I dislike the film. It's a very enjoyable B-grade action movie. But it can't transcend the clichés of the genre.

One of the clichés the film adheres to is that the villain must be English. Well, at least I think he is. John Lithgow plays the main baddie and puts on an accent of some sort. But it's an amusing performance. His best bit has to be when he gets Stallone to climb up a rockface to get his money. "You, stay,” he says to the dribbling Rooker. And then to Stallone: “You, fetch." The joy is in his exaggerated enunciation. ‘Fetch’ somehow seems to have acquired an additional five syllables. Another funny bit is when Stallone throws Lithgow's money into the helicopter's rotors. "Damn you, Walker!" he screams like he's split a fingernail.

But there are other English villains. The first is Caroline Goodall who comes across as a low-rent Emma Thompson. But much more amusing is Craig Fairbrass (Dan out of EastEnders). His performance is atrocious. All he does is shout and swear. And he does it in a thick Cockney accent. “Fack this! Fack that!”

Fairbrass is immortalised in the scene where the drooling Michael Rooker goads him into beating him up. The Cockney is about as bright as a puddle of oil and forgoes a quick kill in favour of a prolonged pummeling. It turns out that Fairbrass' character is an ex-footballer. I guess this shouldn't be too surprising when his dialogue consists of lines like: "Yeah? And you're a loudmouth punk slag who's about to die." The only people I know who talk like that are West Ham fans.

But Fairbrass proceeds to give Rooker a surreal football-themed kicking, complete with running commentary – he even runs up to take a penalty. Is this how Hollywood sees the English? We're either effete brigands or beer-swilling hooligans. Actually, thinking about it, it's quite an accurate observation. Well done Renny Harlin. In your world of back-swimming sharks and flying Indy cars, you managed to find a single truth.

However, my favourite villain of all is played by Leon (he's so cool he doesn't even have a surname). He’s a tough Lennox Lewis-looking-like-motherfucker who eschews Fairbrass' shouty brand of villainy and instead tries to be quietly intimidating. This would be great but his line delivery is atrocious. He has no timing and seems incapable of emphasizing the right words. Where Lithgow can stretch and bend and slather layers of wonderful ham on his dialogue, Leon can only make his words sound like leaden mouth farts.

But to give the guy his dues, it is noticeable that, unlike Fairbrass, he does excel once he gives in to his urge to shout. He has a great scene in a cave where he actually seems like a genuine threat - he stalks Stallone and his girl with menace, taunting impotent old whitey with his ultimate fear; his girl having a black dick thrust upon her (and her liking it!). But before Stallone’s girlfriend Jessie has to suffer this outrage, Stallone grabs Leon by the balls and gorilla presses him through a spike. It's a WWE sort of death…which unsurprisingly I dig a great deal. (Although the filmmakers did miss a trick by not having Stallone yell, ‘You get the point!’ before shish-kebabing the scary black man.)

Speaking of Stallone, how does he fair in this film? Well, I've never really had much of a problem with Sly as an actor. Yeah, technically he’s not too great and yes he sounds like a man who was born with his brain upside down, but he is capable of a good performance here and there - just watch Copland or Rocky Balboa. Sadly, Cliffhanger is not one of those films. He’s okay at the beginning, showing humour and charm, but after the accident it all goes downhill. His idea of being haunted is to mope about like a thirteen-year-old that's been told to stop using his father's credit card to download porn. It's so amateurish.

Thank Christ then for Stallone’s bulging biceps! It’s these puppies that are given the opportunity to shine. I mean, just take the scene where the villains order Stallone to climb the mountain to retrieve their money. They make him remove his jacket. I can't help but feel that this wasn't done to prove how evil the villains are, but to allow Sly to climb while flaunting his thick, muscular arms. We don't want those babies covered up, no sirree!

However, Stallone and his biceps look like Marlon Brando compared to the "Whoa, dude!" extreme sports enthusiasts that pop up. They're sort of like Bill and Ted but without the charm. In fact, I wasn't distraught that one of them died; I was distraught that one survived. But at least the death of the Kurt Cobain lookalike gives us a hilarious silent "No!" moment from the gurning Michael Rooker, who once again amazes me with his sincere cheese. But then later on we get to relive the hilarity, because Frank's death elicits another rib-tickling "No!" moment.

Hey, what can I say, the old buzzard had it coming. You ain't laughing now, are you?

Directed by Renny Harlin
Written by Michael France and Sylvester Stallone
Produced by Renny Harlin and Alan Marshall
Original Music by Trevor Jones
Cinematography by Alex Thomson
Starring Sylvester Stallone, John Lithgow and Michael Rooker

Running Time: 112 mins

Rated R for language, violence against both humans and animals, and horrible Cock-er-nee stereotypes

127 Hours

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Wed, 11 May 2011 17:36:00 +0000

This is no word of a lie - after watching 127 Hours, my arm ached for hours. And not just a minor ache. The bone inside hummed. I was having difficulty lifting my arm. I ended up going to sleep in some minor discomfort.

All of this is small fry shit compared to what Aron Ralston (James Franco) has to go through. On a hiking trip in Moab, Utah, he gets his arm trapped under a boulder. Alone in a small canyon passage, and with only a small amount of water, some food and his hiking equipment, his chances of survival are grim.

I shouldn’t really have any reason to doubt Danny Boyle. By now in his career, he’s made so many great films. You’re almost always guaranteed something special. But although I was interested in the story, I still couldn’t quite get it out of my head that the star of the film was James Franco. You know, he of the smarmy leer - the omnipresent limelight drain; the aloof pie-eating leech that sucked the life out of the Oscars. But colour me pleasantly surprised. He’s excellent here.

Maybe Franco excels in 127 Hours because he gets so little time to interact with other human beings. In other films, he seems so detached that you can’t help but wonder whether he breathes the same air that we do. But 127 Hours has proved that that’s a little mean of me. Even though this is the James Franco show, he’s not the least bit cold. He’s finally proved that he’s a human being after all; that he’s not some dastardly smarm-bot created by the smarm-god Roger Moore in a laboratory with the aim of destroying pop culture.

The beginning of the movie shows what Ralston does with his freedom. He ignores his mother and sister, he treks off into the wilderness on his own and he’s a relentless show off - he even lies to a couple of hikers he meets in the canyon and tells them that he’s an engineer when in reality he works in a store. He’s not a bad guy, but he’s far too sure of his self. He thinks he’s in total control. The canyon is something for him to conquer, rather than to enjoy for its own reasons.

The hard, cold dose of reality is the boulder that pins him to a canyon passage. This is was not in his plan.

However, for all of his self-confidence, Ralston is one of the few people that is equipped to survive an ordeal like this. He may tell the odd fib here and there to impress the girls, but he knows his stuff. He knows that he has to keep calm and that he has to ration his food and his water.

At first Ralston tries to free his arm by cutting into the rock. Then, when he realises that this is achieving nothing, he tries to use his climbing gear to lift the rock from his arm. He manages to rig an elaborate winch. But Ralston isn’t strong enough - he reckons that it would take eight guys to be able to lift the boulder. Eventually Ralston realises that he’s going to have to cut his arm off.

Now this could be a simple blood and guts tale. Man gets stuck in a canyon, man cuts his arm off with a dull pen knife. But although the amputation is horrifyingly gruesome, Boyle’s skill lies in expanding the space of this tiny hole. You really get into Ralston’s head. Here’s a guy who thought he had it sussed - he thought he had everything worked out. But then came this boulder. Pinned to the wall, he gets to see ants and insects continue their existence, possessing a freedom he no longer shares.

For me, the film began to turn into something special when Ralston began to hallucinate. He begins to see his family sitting on a sofa in front of him in the canyon. No words are exchanged; no maudlin platitudes are shared. Instead they’re bathed in a golden light. Here are the people that care about him. Here are the people that are going to suffer if he can’t get out of this hole. And these are also the people that he has shut out. He finally begins to realize their importance; they’re finally coming out of the darkness.

Later Ralston even sees a child sitting on the sofa. This is a vision of the future he could have. He could be a father. He could have a family of his own. And there are also some wonderful flashbacks to Ralston’s past. We see him mucking about with his mum and dad and his sister. We get the impression that he’s forgotten about this - about how much these moments mean to him.

It’s only when Ralston has made this inner journey that he has the resolve to extricate himself from the hole. Using the dull pen knife, he begins to hack into his arm. Here you get to see another side of Danny Boyle’s character. He’s also a blood and guts man. The scene is truly horrific. Ralston breaks his arm a couple of times and then desperately amputates his dead limb. It’s a savage sequence and one that is aided greatly by Boyle’s command of the language of cinema. He knows that blood and guts on their own don’t really convey much. The true horror is in the sound effects. First its the breaking of his arm and then it’s the wailing guitars that come shredding from the speakers whenever Ralston touches a nerve. It immediately brings to mind the agony of going to the dentist when a nerve is hit. Except this is a horror on a much larger scale.

After Ralston frees himself from the boulder and the canyon passage, he has the good fortune to stumble upon the path of a hiking family. He looks like a shell of the man he used to be and for the first time since we meet him he has to accept help from other people. Finally he knows that he can’t do everything on his own - that other people are there to help shoulder the burden.

Ralston’s character has an interesting view on his ordeal. He thinks that the boulder has been waiting for him his whole life - the two were always destined to meet. This sounds terrifying but you can also take comfort from it. It doesn’t mean that there’s a god up there pulling strings. It means that what’s going to happen is going to happen. It’s up to us to make the most of it and to learn from it. Hopefully most of us won’t require a boulder to tells us that we need to treat our families and loved ones with compassion and respect.

Directed by Danny Boyle
Written by Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy
Produced by Danny Boyle, Christian Colson and John Smithson
Original Music by A.R. Rahman
Cinematography by Enrique Chediak and Anthony Dod Mantle
Starring James Franco

Running Time: 94 mins

Rated R for language and amputation by blunt pen knife

The King's Speech

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 05:58:00 +0000

Has there been a more idiotic decision in recent cinema than Harvey Weinstein’s choice to re-release The King’s Speech as a PG-13 movie? I mean, surely The King’s Speech has been successful enough, winning Oscars galore and raking in hundreds of millions of dollars. Apparently not - now it must appeal to the kids.

And how is Harvey Scissorhands going to achieve this new rating? He’s going to achieve it by cutting out some of the swearing. Now I guess quite a few people could formulate an argument about foul language not being essential to any movie. Never mind that it provides authenticity and mirrors the way that people actually speak (have you ever tried to watch the cleaned-up version of Goodfellas on AMC - it’s fucking weird; especially when the swearing is censored but the bone-shattering violence is left intact). But here the language is also essential to the plot.

One key scene has Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), the King’s speech therapist, proving that the King doesn’t stammer when he swears. The King then goes on to prove the point by swearing beautifully and fluently. It’s the first time in the film that Logue manages to make a dent in the King’s armour - it’s the first time that he begins to get to the core of him. So what justification can there be for altering this? Are they going to have the King say ‘Frick’ and ‘Poop’? That would be fucking ridiculous. And really, is making the film a PG-13 really going to make it any more money? It’s already made a bucketload of dosh on a very meagre budget; I don’t think that castrating it is going to attract floods of kids and teenagers. I think it’s done as well as it’s going to do.

So how do I feel about The King’s Speech winning Best Picture at the Academy Awards? Well, I feel far better now than when I hadn’t seen it. I was highly aggrieved that The Social Network didn’t win and was disappointed to see yet another film about someone overcoming adversity clearing up at the awards. But now that I’ve seen the film, I no longer have any animosity towards it. Yeah I still think that The Social Network got shafted, but The King’s Speech is a fine film.

One of my main fears at school and university was getting up in front of my class and speaking. I would literally worry about it for weeks beforehand and build the event up to colossal proportions in my mind. But I only had to speak to a few kids and a teacher. I didn’t have to get up in front of thousands. Plus I didn’t have a speech impediment. Sure my voice might have wavered as I spoke, but I didn’t have a stammer to contend with.

Another memory from school is having to listen to children with stammers perform presentations. It was always a painful experience. I’d try and be supportive but I have to admit that frustration would always creep into my mind - I’d often be thinking ‘just spit it out’ or ‘how much longer is this going to go on for?’. These aren’t particularly empathetic emotions, but they’re natural ones. So to have a King with a stammer, you’re taking this and blowing it up to a grand scale.

There’s a scene near the beginning where Prince Albert (Colin Firth), the future King, has to give a speech at the British Empire Exhibition. As you see him preparing, you can’t help but feel anxious on his behalf. You know that this is going to be a tortuous experience. And then there are all the people who offer their stupid advice - ‘make the microphone do the work’. Yeah, that’ll cure my stammer, numbnuts. But it’s the little details that help sell the terror. We’re told that the speech is going to be transmitted across the world and that when a little red light next to the microphone stops flashing, the Prince will be speaking live to the world. My sphincter tightened a little bit on his behalf when the blinking light finally turned into a solid red.

The disaster of this experience has the future King seeking help from the best doctors in England. None of them are worth a damn and they make the Prince do humiliating things like stuff marbles in his mouth. Plus they say that smoking is good for a stammer - apparently it relaxes the throat.

When the Prince and his wife end up at the door of Lionel Logue, it’s a completely different experience. His offices are almost falling apart and he doesn’t have any staff. He seems to run a ramshackle operation. But unlike the other therapists, Logue doesn’t offer crazy solutions. He tries to go deeper into the problem - he doesn’t want to just solve the mechanics.

A lot of the enjoyment of the film is watching the battle between Logue and the Prince. Angry and obstinate, the future King doesn’t want to get to the root of his problem; he just wants his affliction gone. But Logue knows that the best way to help the Prince’s problem is to treat more than the surface issue. Of course, this doesn’t always go down well. The Prince doubtlessly sees Logue as an inferior. He shouldn’t have to open himself up to him - it’s silly and undignified.

The efforts to ease the stammer sometimes resemble a battle. However, it’s a battle that’s difficult to win as the Prince’s insecurity often gets in the way. For a long time he refuses to put himself entirely in Logue’s hands. The difference in their social standing is perhaps an easy get-out clause for the King. When things get too painful or too personal he can bring the walls smashing down without lifting a finger.

The Prince illustrates this in a scene where Logue and Albert go for a walk. Logue insists that one day Albert could be King. Logue then makes the mistake of touching the Prince’s arm. Angered by this treasonous talk and this over-familiarity, not to mention the horrifying prospect of him being King, the Prince lashes out by mocking Logue’s acting aspirations and taking the piss out of his poor, working class, colonial origins. The way that the scene is filmed is quite marvelous. As the future King storms off you see Logue in the background, rooted to the spot. As the Prince walks, Logue gets smaller and smaller. His spirits are crushed and with just a few words he’s been reduced to a speck. Just when he thought he was getting close to the Prince, he’s put back in his place.

There are some things about the film that don’t work as well as they could have. King Edward (Guy Pearce) and Wallis Simpson are pretty one-dimensional. They’re shallow party fiends that don’t really seem to have a brain cell between them. It also feels that Winston Churchill (Timothy Spall) has been shoe-horned into the story because he’s a figure that everyone will recognise. Indeed, watching the film, it would be easy to miss the fact that he wasn’t the Prime Minister during the outbreak of World War Two. There has definitely been some simplification.

But simplification is often necessary in a biopic - there’s often too much detail to cram into a two hour film. The important thing is how good the core of the film is. And the core of The King’s Speech is definitely the friendship between the Prince and Logue.

There’s another great scene that occurs during the preparations for the coronation. The soon to be King confronts Logue with the fact that Logue is not a qualified doctor. Logue then points out that he never pretended to be - that the sign on his office lists him as Mister. He then points out all the soldiers that he treated for shell shock after the First World War. He speaks calmly and knowledgeably and with a complete lack of bullshit. He’s a man of experience and integrity - he’s the complete opposite of the Harvey Street quacks the King had dealt with previously. Logue will never lie or humiliate the King. He wants to meet the King on equal terms and help him solve his problem. It’s only near the end that that plea for equality is returned; that the men truly operate at the same level.

Watching this movie, you’d think the King’s first wartime speech was one of the most important events in World War Two. I say bullshit to that. If the King had stammered, little old England would have been fine. But such is the strength of the film, that the speech does indeed feel like a make or break situation. It feels like the fate of a nation is hanging on the King’s ability not to stammer. Again, like the beginning of the film, the tension is enormous.

I’d be lying if I said that the final speech wasn’t incredibly rousing. With anxious close-ups of the King and cutaways to civilians and troops, it feels like you’re walking a tightrope. If the King doesn’t stammer, we’ll have the strength to fight these Nazi bastards. If he does we’re probably going to capitulate. It’s a nonsense feeling but it’s still grimly effective. And when the King gets through the speech unscathed, it doesn’t matter that this event has been blown up into crazy proportions or that in reality the King had been speaking well since 1927 (with the help of Logue of course). You get swept up in the emotion of the piece. And of course, being an Englishman living abroad, I’m even more susceptible to the brand of patriotism contained in the film. I don’t believe in the monarchy but during this film I believed in the King.

Directed by Tom Hooper
Written by David Seidler
Produced by Iain Canning, Emile Sherman and Gareth Unwin
Original Music by Alexandre Desplat
Cinematography by Danny Cohen
Starring Colin Firth, Helena Bonham Carter, Geoffrey Rush and Guy Pearce

Running Time: 118 mins

Rated R for bloody posh swearing

The Damned United

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 04:56:00 +0000

Brian Clough was one of the most amazing managers that the footballing world has ever seen. Brash, loud and outspoken, he took not one but two provincial, second division teams and turned them into English champions (with Nottingham Forest, he even turned them into European champions!). It’s a feat that is unlikely to be repeated.

But then there’s Clough’s tenure as manager of Leeds United. Lasting just 44 days in the job, it was an unmitigated disaster. He alienated the fans, the players and turned a championship winning team into relegation candidates. It’s this blip in Clough’s illustrious career that is the focus for The Damned United.

Some context: in the late 60s, Leeds United were one of the top teams in England. Under Don Revie, they won English championships and European titles. They played a particularly brutal kind of football, but they were effective. Derby County on the other hand weren’t even in the top division; they were bringing up the rear of the second division. But in Brian Clough they had one of the best young managers in the game. Given time, he’d win them promotion and turn them into English champions.

Given that Brian Clough achieved such great things in his career, it’s interesting that the film chooses to focus on his lowest ebb. How many times have we seen films where a coach takes a bunch of nobodies and turns them into winners? It’s the story of every other sports film. But here we have a film where a manager takes a group of superstars and turns them into losers - it’s the sports movie turned inside out.

The film begins with Clough’s tenure at Derby. Don Revie’s Leeds United are visiting for a cup game and Clough is starstruck. He holds Leeds and Revie in high esteem and orders his staff to fix up the football ground so that it’s in a more appropriate condition to be visited by such illustrious guests. He orders that a sign be repainted, that the walls be cleaned and that the pitch look like a carpet (an impossible feat when it looks like a mud bath). In short, he’s like a child who is being visited by his idol.

When Leeds arrive, Don doesn’t even acknowledge Clough. And to make matters worse, Leeds are less than sporting in the game. They kick lumps out of the Derby players and then one of them dives in order to gain a penalty. And then when the game’s over, again Revie doesn’t acknowledge Clough – he shakes everyone else’s hand. A bigger fuck you, you couldn’t ask for.

Clough’s subsequent success at Derby, which includes edging out Leeds for the championship, is painted almost entirely as revenge against Revie. Aggrieved that his idol didn’t even know or care who he was, he makes sure that everyone now knows who he is.

One of the great things about The Damned United is that it realises that there’s more drama off the pitch than on. And it’s even more appealing because the off pitch drama features none of the usual football cliches - sex and booze. This is just a tale of revenge, of obsession, of friendship and of ego. It’s the story of men in dirty, smelly dressing rooms, plotting revenge against one another. It’s the story of muddy boots and rain-soaked pitches. It’s class warfare, the north/south divide and the tedious encroachment of commerce exploding in the melting pot of a football match. It’s all the little things that make England so great and so frustrating (civic pride, provincialism, passion, anger) brought to you in concentrated form. Where else but in England would the greatest English manager never be given the job of managing the national side? But where else but in England would such a big-headed loud mouth be so loved and adored (he has statues in Derby, Nottingham and Middlesbrough)?

To give you a taste of Clough’s arrogance, there’s his first training session at Leeds United. Don Revie has left to become England manager and Clough has been hired to fill in the gap. Now how does Clough try and win the players over? Does he pamper their egos? Does he say how pleased he is to be their coach? No. He tells the players that they never won a championship fairly and that they can throw all their medals in the bin because they’re meaningless. Suffice it to say, the players aren’t impressed. However, it’s for this reason and for many others that Clough is so beloved in England. He refuses to pander. He’ll only speak his mind. There’s no compromise. But even though he’s abrasive, Clough is genuine. He’s sincere. He’s the complete opposite of Revie, who always came across like a second-hand car dealer.

Revie is openly mocked by Clough’s assistant Peter Taylor, who laughs at the Leeds manager’s various superstitions. But a lot of the drama in the film actually comes from the relationship between Clough and his number two. They’re great friends, but as Clough becomes increasingly successful, so he becomes harder to deal with. He begins to attribute Derby’s success wholly to himself, lessening Taylor’s vital contribution. Clough might be an excellent motivator and tactician, but it’s Taylor who can spot potential and help bring players to the club. Both men essentially fill-in each others’ weaknesses.

Of course it doesn’t help that Clough has to deal with a tedious chairman. As his gloomy employer, Clough’s chairman is constantly worrying about money. It’s a grim reminder that in modern football money is always the bottom line. Those who have it can buy success. Those who don’t have it are forced to struggle. But back in this era, buying power had yet to determine the best teams. Yes, money was creeping in, but you could still have a team that’s in the second division one year and is then challenging for the championship the next. That’s unthinkable nowadays, but in the 70s the manager was still the boss. The club was run by him, not by foreign billionaires.

So with all of this power and all of this success, Clough does that very English thing of fucking it all up. He pisses off the Derby chairman and then writes a resignation letter on behalf of him and his assistant in a bid to strengthen his position in the club. After all, the board would never accept his resignation, would they? Not after winning them the championship.

Clough does all of this without telling Taylor. Taylor is miffed. He’s happy at Derby. It’s a home to him. And when the board accepts their resignation, they’re cast into the wilderness.

One of the strongest scenes in the film comes during a trip to Spain. Clough and Taylor have been hired by Brighton (a team in the third division!) and are relaxing on the beach. Out of nowhere comes a man in a suit. He’s Leeds United’s club secretary and he’s offering Clough the job as manager. Clough accepts and wants Taylor to join him. But Taylor is outraged. They’ve only just accepted the job at Brighton. Plus they hate Leeds. Clough says he wants to win the championship with Leeds but he wants to do it better than they did with Revie. An argument ensues and Clough calls Taylor a parasite. It’s a horrible, heartbreaking moment and you know that Clough doesn’t mean a word of what he says, but pride, passion and ambition have clouded his mind.

Without Taylor, Clough performs dismally at Leeds. The players kick him around on the training ground, they under-perform on the pitch and they even slam the dressing room door in his face. Quite what Clough expected from them, I don’t know. He openly criticised Leeds before becoming their manager and then criticised them as their manager. The whole enterprise was doomed to failure from the beginning. But it ends up being a worthy exercise as after he’s fired, Clough comes crawling back to Taylor. He literally gets on his hands and knees and begs for forgiveness, finally learning some humility. And it’s here as Clough and Taylor are reunited that the film suddenly becomes a bro-mance. It’s perhaps the only false step in an otherwise masterful film. I have nothing wrong with the way that the scene is written or acted but the musical choice is poor - some schmaltzy song plays in the background.

But this one misstep doesn’t affect the power of the film. Michael Sheen is magnificent as Brian Clough and Timothy Spall is excellent as Peter Taylor. Indeed, this makes the third British icon that Sheen has successfully played. First he played Tony Blair, then he played David Frost and here he plays Brian Clough. But his performance never feels like an imitation. He inhabits the role of ol’ big head perfectly.

Another thing that especially pleased me about the film was the use of archive footage. For some reason, it’s very difficult to accurately film a football game. It always ends up looking phoney. The Damned United gets around that by showing actual football very sparingly. And then when it does show it, most of it’s archive footage. I don’t know why, but seeing this old footage is incredibly soothing to me - a warm reminder of the country I love and the country I left behind. Sure I wasn’t even born when these games were played, but I consumed them as a teenager and as such they’re a part of who I am.

I also loved seeing the real footage of Brian Clough at the end. And to think that after the Leeds debacle Clough and Taylor took Nottingham Forest from the second division to the first division, and then not only won the championship in their first season in the top flight but then subsequently won two European Championships! These men were giants.

However, while the film ends on a high with the footage of Clough bringing the European Cup to Forest, he and Taylor later had another final falling out, one that they didn’t recover from. After this falling out they never spoke to each other again. Apparently, when Taylor died, Clough was inconsolable and turned to drink. He even dedicated his autobiography to him with the following dedication: “To Peter. Still miss you badly. You once said, ‘When you get shot of me there won’t be as much laughter in your life’. You were right.” There are victories and defeats in every life. The best we can do is to learn from them. Sadly Brian Clough didn’t learn as much as he should have. He was a glorious, tragic figure.

Side note: I didn’t realise that this was made by Tom Hooper, the same director as The King’s Speech. So that means that I’ve watched Hooper films back to back. However, as much as I enjoyed The King’s Speech, I think The Damned United was even better.

Directed by Tom Hooper
Written by Peter Morgan
Produced by Andy Harries and Grainne Marmion
Original Music by Robert Lane
Cinematography by Ben Smithard
Starring Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall, Jim Broadbent and Colm Meaney

Running Time: 98 mins

Rated R for language and appalling hair

Black Swan

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 05:23:00 +0000

One film immediately sprang to mind while I was watching Black Swan: The Piano Teacher. Both films are about performers trapped in claustrophobic relationships with their mother. Both films are about self-destruction. And both films are about the sacrifices people make for their art, often to the detriment of their well-being.

Another film that sprang to mind was Darren Aronofsky’s previous movie The Wrestler. One of the themes of that film was the way the way the main character destroyed his body for the enjoyment of others. The more he performed, the more he gave to the audience, the less he had for himself. And so it is with Black Swan. Here’s a woman who, like Mickey Rourke’s wrestler, is slowly destroying her body and her soul for other people’s entertainment and amusement.

One of the main bones of contention when I discussed Black Swan with my wife was our differing responses to the mother/daughter relationship portrayed in the film. I sensed a very subtle sexual element. My wife didn’t see it at all.

It’s by no means overt, but there are a couple of hints that there’s some sexual abuse going on in this claustrophobic, co-dependant relationship. There’s one scene where the mother, happy that her daughter Nina (Portman) got the main part in ‘Swan Lake’, gives her a cake. She then puts some of the cream on her finger and insists that her daughter lick it. The aggression is such that you know that she’s not going to take no for an answer. And then there’s another moment when the mother just invites herself into her daughter’s bedroom, and like there’s nothing wrong with this at all, like it’s the most natural thing in the world, says that she’s going to spend the night with her. It’s under the pretext of getting her daughter up early the next morning but this just seems like an excuse – the mother just wants any excuse to invade her daughter’s personal space.

Yes these aren’t overt signs of sexual abuse, but even if nothing physical has ever taken place, there’s at least psycho-sexual abuse going on here. The mother is needy, clingy and demanding, and as such she has ensured that her daughter lives in a state of arrested development. The daughter’s room looks like it belongs to a twelve-year-old. There’s pink everywhere and there are lots of childish knick-knacks. The mother has wrapped her baby up in cotton wool and as such the daughter is ill-prepared to deal with the harsh realities of real life.

But going back to the sexual undertones in the mother/daughter relationship, there’s a scene where Nina masturbates in her room. Before this, the sleazy ballet director that cast the daughter in the lead role in ‘Swan Lake’ encourages her to masturbate so that she can loosen up. He also asks her if she’s a virgin. She says that she isn’t but the true nature of her previous sexual encounters is never explained. They certainly didn’t seem like happy liaisons. Could they possibly have been with her mother? Is this why she’s so uptight? And then when the daughter finally gives in to desire, her wanking session is interrupted when she sees that her mother is sleeping in the corner of her room. The daughter’s sexual identity seems to be strongly tied to her mother – she can’t free herself from her mum’s suffocating grasp.

And it’s this search for liberation that is the main thrust of the film. Portman’s character is told time and time again that her dancing is technically perfect. However, in order to play the lead in ‘Swan Lake’, she must play both the White Swan and the Black Swan. And in order to play the Black Swan she must embrace her dark side: she must lose some of her inhibitions and give in to her emotions.

Needless to say, this is more difficult for Nina than you might imagine. All her life she’s been building a wall. She’s been resisting her emotions – keeping them at bay. And her desire to become a ballerina is a desire to achieve the perfection she can’t obtain in her real life. Therefore it’s always going to be difficult for her to perform with reckless abandon.

However, Portman’s character definitely has demons. The opening sequence superbly illustrates this as we see her dancing with the demon from Swan Lake. Nina is a troubled soul, desperately tying to keep a grip.

As Nina gets closer to the opening night, so she becomes more and more unhinged. There are some excellent visual touches that display her paranoia. One of my favourites was the shot where her reflection turns to look at her as she looks away. The direction is very casual and doesn’t draw attention to itself, but it’s rather beautiful and unsettling.

There are also some nice visual flourishes when Nina goes to a nightclub. As she dances under some strobe lights we briefly get flashes of the Black Swan. She’s finally embracing the darkness inside her.

Nina even goes so far as to take Lily, a rival dancer, home and have sex with her. But as we later find out, this is pure fantasy. Nina is beginning to unravel – her perceptions are becoming skewed.

The shit hits the fan when Nina finds Lily in her dressing room, dressed as the Black Swan and apparently ready to take her part. A struggle ensues and Lily turns into Nina. Nina then ends up stabbing and killing her duplicate. The passion, the energy and the emotion that she previously lacked comes out like a volcano – she’s ready to be the Black Swan.

The final performance is quite breathtaking and the sequence where she actually performs as the Black Swan is a fantastic piece of cinema. It’s wild and it’s loose, and there’s a magnificent visual flourish as Portman grows black feathers and wings burst out of her back. All of the time she’s been seeking perfection in her dancing and now she finally has it. She has everyone at her feet – the audience, her fellow performers and even the ballet director; they’re all in her thrall.

However, when Nina gets back to the dressing room she discovers that she didn’t stab her competitor at all – she stabbed herself and is bleeding to death. Somehow Nina manages to continue and gives it her all in the final act. As the White Swan lays there dying (and as she herself lays there dying), she says that she was perfect. Some performers say that they have to kill themselves for their audience. Well, Nina literally does that. And she also ends up being an echo of the character she portrays. She starts off innocent, looking for the freedom that a perfect performance will bring. But then she’s tricked by her demons and ends up destroying herself. But through this destruction she finally finds liberation – finally achieving perfection and finally receiving recognition from her peers and her audience, she can give up the ghost, knowing that nothing will ever supplant this moment.

The Talented Mr Ripley

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 06:30:00 +0000

I first saw The Talented Mr Ripley during its original theatrical run. It got decent reviews and looked like an intriguing film. However, I didn’t quite expect it to be as good as it was. For my money, it was one of the best films of the year.

Since then, The Talented Mr Ripley has kind of fallen off the radar a little. It’s still a respected film, but I think it’s perceived as only a modest success - a film that is perhaps too controlled, too mannered and generally lacking in the thrills and spills associated with the thriller genre. And this is a huge shame, as the film works on many levels and deserves to be recognised as one of the best films of the 90s.

What’s so remarkable about the film, looking at it from 2011, is Matt Damon. I associate him so acutely with the Bourne films that it’s surprising to remember that he played Tom Ripley, and that he played him so well. Completely dispensing with the macho meathead persona he cultivated in the risible Good Will Hunting, he plays a gay sociopath who gets irrevocably tangled in his own web of lies.

It’s this laxity with the truth that is fundamental to Ripley. Tom is a young man who is ashamed of himself. He’s ashamed that he lives in a basement and that he works as a toilet attendant. He knows that he’s capable of much more. And it’s this shame that leads him to tell his first lie of the movie - while chatting to some people at a party, he tells them that he went to Princeton (he never went; he’s only borrowing a jacket from a friend). It’s a small untruth, but the consequences of this one lie are severe.

Lies often have a way of taking a life of their own. They grow, they develop and soon they have you trapped, which, perversely enough, is the complete opposite intention of the lie. Usually small lies are told to protect - to protect people from pain, humiliation or ridicule. In effect, they’re supposed to liberate you from your humdrum existence - to keep brutal reality at bay.

And at the beginning of the film, this is what happens to Tom. He lies about being from Princeton and all of a sudden he’s being sent to Italy by the rich shipping merchant Herbet Greenleaf to bring his wayward son Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) back to America. The wonder of this mission is beautifully visualised by the way that Ripley ascends from his wretched basement apartment to a waiting limousine on the street. This is what Ripley has been waiting for - the good life.

Now this one little lie need not damn Ripley forever more. But the trouble with lies is that they grow like weeds. Everything that is good gets obliterated by this hostile force.

Ripley’s second lie is the one that comes back to haunt him. Upon arrival in Italy, he bumps into Meredith Logue (Cate Blanchett), a wealthy textiles heiress. She tells him how impressed she is at how light he’s travelling - he has a couple of bags while she seems to have an entire boatload. Immediately Ripley’s inferiority complex rises to the surface and he tells her that he’s Dickie Greenleaf (even though his bags are in the ‘R’ section), keeping the humiliation of his poverty and poor social standing at bay. But what makes Tom a truly talented individual is the way that he can roll with his lies. Meredith saw him retrieving his luggage from the ‘R’ stand and she also knows who the Greenleafs are. So Tom spins her a charming story about travelling under a false name in a bid to try and remain anonymous - he’s a sensitive rich type, not a braggart. This wins over Meredith, who’s also travelling under a false name - he’s already made his first friend in Italy.

Despite his penchant for lies, Ripley is also capable of making some incredibly honest insights. When Ripley sets up an ‘accidental’ meeting on a beach, Dickie is aghast at how white he is - he actually calls him grey. Ripley replies by saying it’s only an undercoat - he wants to paint over his real self; he wants to be reborn.

Ripley manages to ingratiate himself with Dickie and proceeds to add layers to his dull undercoat. Lacking any real identity of his own, or ashamed of the one he actually has, he pretends to be a lover of jazz (Dickie is a big fan) and becomes a confidant for Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), Dickie’s long suffering girlfriend. In short, he eventually becomes one of the family. They go to bars (Ripley is beside himself with joy when Dickie asks him to help perform a jazz song at a Naples club), they go sailing and they plan holidays together. Ripley even helps to hide Dickie’s affairs from Marge. They’re like brothers.

The only thing complicating matters is Ripley’s sexual attraction to Dickie. Ripley grows obsessed with him and their relationship begins to corrode. One excellent scene has the two playing chess together in the bathroom. Dickie’s bathing and Ripley is sitting by his side. Ripley then decides to make a risky move and says that he’s cold and asks if he can get in the bath. Dickie says no and Tom sheepishly replies that he didn’t mean that he wanted to get in the bath with Dickie still in there, even though this is totally what he wanted. And then Ripley ogles Dickie’s naked form in the mirror. From here their relationship sours - Dickie isn’t going to give Ripley the warmth he needs.

To make matters worse, Dickie’s friend Freddie (Philip Seymour Hoffman) turns up. He’s one of those annoying friends of a friend that can immediately see right through you - they can see your foibles, your weakness and your bullshit. All of the magic that you used on your mutual friend doesn’t work and you’re naked.

Ripley’s most humiliating exposure comes during a trip to a record store. Ripley acts like Dickie’s nagging wife and keeps telling him not to miss their train. Freddie and Dickie can only laugh at him and Ripley’s security is gone - he no longer feels like part of a family; he feels like a fool. And there’s one hilarious moment when Freddie literally dances at Ripley - with the look he gives Tom, you know that there’s only going to be one winner in this duel.

Things come to a head between Dickie and Ripley during a ride on a small boat. Ripley is mortified that Dickie is finally going to marry Marge, saying that Dickie loves him. The writing in this scene is excellent. Ripley lays himself bare but reveals himself to be jealous and clingy. He also reads far too much into certain things. Dickie is a sax player but later in the film expresses a desire to learn the drums. Of course this takes on a sexual connotation and Ripley asks Dickie to make his mind up - does he want to play sax or drums. A scuffle then ensues and Ripley ends up killing Dickie with an oar. The first strike is an attack but everything else is out of protection - Dickie is literally going to throttle him. So the murder has a strange disorientating feeling. And there’s an excellent touch at the end when, from above, you see Ripley lying with Dickie’s arm draped over him. For a brief few moments he can pretend that he has what he wants.

Jude Law is such a force in the film that it’s hard not to miss him once his character is killed off. Immediately following Dickie’s death, the film begins to drag ever so slightly. It’s still highly entertaining, but as Ripley’s web becomes more and more tangled, so the plot begins to stretch plausibility. You see, after Greenleaf’s death, Ripley pretends to be Dickie and lots of the scenes revolve around him either imitating Greenleaf or trying to convince people that he’s still alive. In a weird way Ripley becomes almost like a Bruce Wayne/Clark Kent type. Tom is the real him while Dickie is his superhero alter-ego.

As Dickie, Ripley gets to indulge in all of his deepest fantasies. These mainly revolve around him playing the piano and furnishing his overly fussy apartment. Freddie Miles actually gets things right when he turns up out of nowhere on Tom’s doorstep. He says the flat is horrible. Sure Tom might like the finer things in life but his taste borders on the Liberace. Which is kind of amusing when you consider how stylish Dickie is - it’s like Tom learned nothing from him. But then again, Dickie and Ripley are like chalk and cheese. Dickie’s style and taste is very forward thinking, while Tom harks back to the past - he’s old before his time.

Going back to Ripley’s split personality, though, there’s an excellent piece of imagery that perfectly illustrates what Minghella is trying to get across. In the reflection of a piano lid we see Ripley split in two. The further he indulges in his fantasies of being Dickie, the more he loses himself.

And strangely enough, the film actually picks up once Tom decides to permanently return to being Ripley. In the form of a man called Peter-Smith Kingsley, Ripley sees the chance of happiness. With Peter, Tom can almost be himself. The only thing that gets in the way is Tom’s secret. Ripley even says himself that he wants to give Tom the key to the basement and let him know everything, but because he knows the truth would kill the relationship, he’s damned - he’ll never be truly free.

The end to the film is darkly ironic. On a boat trip with his lover, Ripley bumps into Meredith again. Suddenly the impulsive lie he told at the beginning of the film - the one about being Dickie Greenleaf - comes back to bite him. He has two options: he can either kill Meredith or he can kill his lover - he can’t leave them both on board; the truth would eventually come out. Killing Meredith is the most obvious solution but she’s travelling with her family. Therefore, he has to kill Peter. You can see the light being snuffed out of Tom. At one point Meredith even asks him if he’s alone. He wasn’t before but he is now.

The final scene has Tom returning to his cabin, knowing he has to kill his lover. Even though Ripley is a rather wretched individual, he does always have my sympathies. He does monstrous things but he doesn’t kill because he enjoys it. He’s a slave to emotion and impulse. He’s always trying to protect himself - he’s always fighting for survival. Yes he’s to blame for digging a hole but he’s always trying to reach for the light. And then just when he sees it, it’s gone.

Before he kills him, Ripley asks Peter to tell some good things about Tom Ripley. Peter rattles off a long list and then the dialogue merges into the sounds of murder. Ripley is killing his happiness just so that he can survive; a miserable future awaits.

The final shots are a couple of masterstrokes. After the murder the camera turns around Ripley’s face. At first it’s light, but then it gradually darkens and is cast in shadow. And then from a long shot somewhere in the cabin we see a door closing on Ripley and Tom disappears. He’s going to be locked in the basement forever. His last way out has been slammed shut.

Directed and Written by Anthony Minghella
Produced by William Horberg and Tom Sternberg
Original Music by Gabriel Yared
Cinematography by John Seale
Film Editing by Walter Murch
Starring Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Cate Blanchett and Philip Seymour Hoffman

Running Time: 139 mins

Rated R for violence, language and man love

Robin Hood

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 02:32:00 +0000

Good old reliable Robin Hood. You can always count on him for a rollicking adventure. Whether it’s Errol Flynn or that Yank from Prince of Thieves or that fat bastard from the recent BBC series, he always tries his best to entertain. Sure he may not always succeed but at least he has a go.

Oh wait, who’s this coming round the corner? Why it’s Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott, riding a pair of steeds like constipated badgers. Ah look at them; so serious, so earnest, so dull. They’re like a married couple that’s sucked the life out of one another. Sure it was fun at the start but now they’re far too comfortable in each other’s company. Gladiator seems like another life ago.

This is the fifth collaboration between Scott and Crowe, and with the exception of Gladiator, none of their films have set the world on fire. Yet they still insist on making movies together. Maybe it’s the irresistible urge of two curmudgeons getting to eat bagels, smoke cigars and admire one another’s beards for a few months, or maybe it’s the allure of churning out another mediocre flick. This pair really doesn’t bring the best out of each other.

The concept for this iteration of Robin Hood originally focused on the Sheriff of Nottingham. Apparently it painted him in a more sympathetic light and Robin Hood was something of a wanker. Had the filmmakers had the balls to stick with that concept, they might have produced an interesting film. Instead they decided to produce this mish-mash of crap. It’s not faithful to the story we know, but it’s not different enough to shake things up. As a result it straddles an uncomfortable middle ground, making certain choices seem more than a little puzzling.

For instance, Maid Marian. In this film she’s Lady Marian. She was married for a few days and then her husband went off to the Crusades where he promptly died (well, on the way back). Is the idea of a forty-year old maid too horrible to consider (although I think the character is actually supposed to be younger)? Would it make everyone queasy to see Robin Hood de-flowering a spinster? Are people really that delicate?

In reality, the decision to have Maid Marian become Lady Marian is to support the ill-thought out plot. Robin witnesses the murder of Marian’s husband Robert Loxley at the hands of the evil traitor Sir Godfrey and then assumes the identity of Marian’s husband so that he can sneak back into England. He then enters into an arrangement with Loxley’s father Sir Walter to continue impersonating Loxley so that Sir Walter doesn’t lose his land. Okay, I can understand the thinking behind this plan, but this ends up being queasier than having Marian be a virgin. Sure the old man isn’t literally pimping his daughter-in-law out, but he is making her pretend to be in love with a complete stranger - this guy could be capable of anything. Dirty old man.

There’s also a really stupid decision to have Marian take part in the final battle. Really, is this the only way to show that the character has strength - to have her literally battle the French with sword in hand? Of course, Scott also tries to show Marian’s strength in other ways. There’s a scene where some French soldiers are going to burn some English villagers (fucking Frogs!). Marian leads the effort to free them. But these big moments do nothing to hide the fact that the character is painted in broad, spazzy strokes.

Speaking of the final battle, there’s another moment that makes it even more risible. Not only do we have Marian taking part in the fight, but we also see Friar Tuck kicking arse. Nothing else in the film suggests that he would excel in battle. After all, he’s a fat inebriate who cares more about honey than people. But no, there he is, running through Frenchies with his sword. Love a duck.

Even more criminal than all of this, though, is how colourless the villains are. Mark Strong as Sir Godfrey is a shocking non-entity. He doesn’t exude any menace or danger. And King John is just a petulant retch. He’s like a child who’s never heard the word ‘no’ and therefore feels free to double cross his loyal subjects and lounge all day in bed with his French slut.

Then you have the Sheriff of Nottingham, surely one of the most memorable characters in the Robin Hood legend. Here, though, he’s only in a few scenes and comes across as nothing more than a buffoon. It was also a shockingly poor decision to have him played by Matthew Macfadyen, who must possibly be one of the blandest actors working today. He doesn’t have an objectionable screen presence but that’s only because you rarely notice that he’s there. He’s kind of like the lettuce in a burger. He looks okay but he adds absolutely nothing to the experience - he’s screen garnish.

Doubtless Ridley Scott envisaged an amazing character arc from the Sheriff but it’s unlikely that a sequel will get made for this festering piece of poo. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with telling a story that will span more than one film, but at least make each film entertaining. Robin Hood fails miserably on that score and ends up feeling rather cynical - yeah, let’s stretch this story out and milk the public for all their worth; oh fuck, we forgot to make the film watchable.

Something else that depressed me was the visuals. Usually you can count on Ridley for some nice photography. But no, everything was dark and dingy - it was like a layer of sludge had been smeared across the lens. Despite this, I’ve heard people praise the photography, which leads me to wonder if I received a bum copy. Or maybe studios now are being complete wankers and are purposely making ordinary DVDs look like shit so that they can hawk more Blu-Rays. Anyone have any ideas? But certainly the unrelenting dinginess of the print has made me wonder.

But really, don’t waste your time on this film. Watch the one with the mullets instead. Somehow I find the soppy American more endearing than the Aussie who tries to talk and act like Michael Parkinson. I mean, Robin Hood isn’t supposed to be a gruff dullard. If you wanted that you should have just got Ridley Scott to play the part.

Directed by Ridley Scott
Screenplay by Brian Helgeland
Produced by Russell Crowe, Brian Grazer and Ridley Scott
Original Music by Marc Streitenfeld
Cinematography by John Mathieson
Starring Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Max von Sydow, William Hurt and Mark Strong

Running Time: 140 mins

Rated PG-13 for violence and grim-faced humourlessness

Never Let Me Go

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 06:10:00 +0000

It seems like a hell of a long time since Mark Romanek directed his last feature film, One Hour Photo. One of my favourite films of the last ten years, the bar was set high for his follow-up, Never Let Me Go. Based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, the movie has a fine pedigree but it falls short of expectations.

The main issue for me is that a lot of it feels lifeless. It’s a story that doesn’t have any action but it has lots of emotions to contend with. It should be bubbling with energy. Instead it feels cold and detached. It’s far too clinical. It’s only at the end that it sparks into life.

The opening section of the film revolves around Halisham public school. The children in this school are told how special there are. They’re also told that if they venture beyond the perimeter of the property that they’re going to get murderised by ne’er-do-wells. Hmm. This is a bit weird - aggressive fear-mongering from teachers. And why do the kids have electronic tags? Prisoners should be wearing those kinds of things, not children.

If you’ve read the book and already know the premise of the film there’s a lot of fun to be had noting the small details. For instance, there’s a scene where the teachers make a big deal about finding some cigarettes and they lecture the children on the health issues - their precious lungs could be damaged if they smoke the nasty fags. Then you have the fastidious way that bottles of milk are lined up for all the kids to drink. Sure enough this isn’t too odd - I used to have milk at school. But the kids also have a batch of pills to take. Yep, got to keep the little ones healthy. Got to keep those lungs clear and got to make sure that they have proper nutrition. Wouldn’t want them to develop any nasty diseases. After all, what would they do with those lovely organs?

One of the most disappointing things for me in the opening sequence was the way that one of the major scenes was fluffed. There’s a budding romance between a couple of the Halisham children - Tommy and Kathy - and in one scene Tommy buys Kathy a cassette tape. The song that Kathy listens to is called ‘Never Let Me Go’. It should be a huge moment in the film but instead it passes by with barely a whimper.

I was also disappointed with Sally Hawkins’ performance as the kids teacher. I don’t know why but she seems to be getting worse and worse as an actor. She’s developed a jarring range of tics that she’s begun repeating in each role. Her performances don’t feel natural - they feel artificial and mannered. She was even less believable here than she was in Happy Go Lucky and I was mentally shooing her off the screen every time she turned up.

Thankfully Hawkins disappears from the film early on. She makes the mistake of having a conscience and tells the children that they’re clones and that they’re going to have their organs harvested later in life. Again this is another scene that doesn’t really work. The children sit there quietly alarmed and Hawkins overacts like crazy, trying too hard to convey her horror. In order for a scene like this to work you need to believe that there is some inner life to the characters - that under the surface, things are happening. Instead the scene is icily detached.

The second part of the film is dedicated to the characters’ life in The Cottages. Here the characters finally have some sort of interaction with society. However, it’s very limited. There’s one amusing scene where they all go to a cafe and none of them know how to order food. So they all end up ordering the same thing - sausage and chips (yummy!).

A relationship also begins between Tommy and Ruth (played by Keira Knightley). Ruth had stolen Tommy away from Kathy while they were still at Halisham and the springs of their bed get a good pounding - Ruth is fucking Tommy pretty much just to spite Kathy; that and the fact she can’t tolerate the idea that a boy would like anyone more than her. The relationship is very immature but this is entirely appropriate considering the character’s sheltered existence. It’s almost like they’re playing at being adults - they don’t quite understand what it’s all about.

One of the most crushing things about the film is the passivity of the characters. They put up no resistance and like children they put their faith in whispers and gossip - there are rumours that any clones that prove that they’re in love will have their donations deferred for a while. Instead of actually doing anything - running away, attacking those that kill them - they go along with everything like lambs to the slaughter.

The strongest scenes are the ones at the end. Tommy leaves Ruth and finally begins a relationship with Kathy, his one true love. Buoyed by the rumour that couples in love will have their donations deferred, they try and prove their feelings for one another - Tommy takes some of his artwork to the mysterious Madame (a woman who used to visit Halisham to judge the children’s artwork to see if it was good enough to be displayed at ‘The Gallery’). Upon visiting the woman they also encounter their former headmistress. They’re very coldly informed that there are no deferrals and that The Gallery was a failed attempt to prove that clones have souls. One of the women then calls them poor creatures.

The lack of feeling is quite brutal. And considering that it’s heavily implied that the Madam and the headmistress are in a same sex relationship, it’s even more amazing that they’re quick to dismiss people as less than human. As people who are part of a group that’s faced a lot of prejudice, you’d like to assume that their thinking would be a little more enlightened. Surely it’s more than clear that these kids have souls - they think, they feel, they love; they’re human. What does it matter how they came to be on this planet? Is a ‘test tube’ child less human than one that was ‘naturally’ conceived? Instead they’re coldly dismissed as trash. It’s a horrible echo of modern society - in the not too distant wake of civil rights abuses, it’s chilling that so many ethnic minorities can march against gay marriage and gay rights.

The most powerful scene in the film is the one where Tommy finally realises he has no hope and collapses on the ground, screaming. Could anyone doubt that anyone who reacts in such a way doesn’t have a soul? Tommy realises how precious life is and all that he’ll lose - this isn’t the reaction of an animal or a piece of meat.

In the end we get to see Tommy give his last donation and ‘complete’. Speaking to a friend of mine about the scene, we both agreed that the most disturbing thing was the way that Tommy is mistreated once the anaesthesia kicks in. While he’s conscious, he’s treated with respect but once he’s asleep he’s treated like cattle - his head is roughly grabbed and his body is pulled about. Even in a situation as shitty as this, you’d hope the medical staff would have the humanity to treat their subject with respect - they’re professionals after all. Instead Tommy has to suffer one final indignity.

I think the film missed a trick in not ending the film with the song ‘Never Let Me Go’. In its place the film ends with a piece from the rather unremarkable score. I think the song would have given the ending another layer of emotion - it’s our destiny that we’ll lose our loved ones, but we shouldn’t have to let them go prematurely.

The Social Network

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 04:21:00 +0000

Facebook: a presence so pervasive that even I’ve jumped on the bandwagon, dropped my kecks and presented myself to all and sundry. Yeah, look to the right of this page. Look at the purity of my site obliterated by my massive Facebook widget (and my Amazon links and my Twitter feed and my sad, desperate plea for money - give me some money you ungrateful fuckers!). Like me. Please like me. Only thirteen people like me at the moment. How pathetic is that? Add to my numbers. Add to my glory! I’m a whore.

I guess lots of great ideas have been driven by ego or revenge or the need to impress girls. The creation of Facebook seems to follow all of these lines. As told in The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg is a talented but friendless loser. Yes he’s a smart bastard and yes he’s studying at Harvard, but if success if judged by the amount of people you know and the number of friends you have, and in lots of circles it is, then Zuckerberg is at the bottom of the heap. He has one friend and he loses his girlfriend in the opening scene.

To show how clueless Zuckerberg is when it comes to inter-personal relationships you just have to watch the film’s opening exchange. Boastful and dismissive of his girlfriend, he pisses her off to the extent that she leaves him. He’s not too concerned until he realises that she’s serious. Only then does he apologise and he does it with a complete lack of sincerity. He knows that these are the words that he’s supposed to say and the script he’s supposed to follow but there’s no feeling at all - even the biggest idiot would know that he’s not really sorry; he just desperately wants to cling onto this ornament, this decoration that shows that he’s not as big a loser as he seems. But it doesn’t work. His girlfriend still leaves him.

Subsequent to this, Zuckerberg, in a fit of drunken pique, creates a website called Facemash. It features every girl at Harvard and has them lined up in a ‘Hot or Not’-style women-as-meat contest. It successfully degrades every woman on campus and briefly entertains the male half of the university - it gets so many hits that it brings the school network to its knees. Revenge successfully achieved, Mark then has to face the music. But at his hearing Zuckerberg doesn’t display any remorse. He feels that he’s provided the university with a useful lesson - he’s highlighted the flaws in their security.

With Facemash as his first success, Zuckerberg then uses his petulant streak to achieve even greater notoriety. Hired by the Winklevoss twins (who are seamlessly portrayed by one actor) to create a kind of Harvard dating site, Mark decides to plunder their idea and create The Facebook (as it’s known then). As he’s working on it, he manages to avoid meeting his bosses by sending them texts and emails with various excuses. He gives them the runaround for six weeks before finally revealing The Facebook. The Winklevoss’ are understandably pissed off.

One of the many things I like about The Social Network is the ambiguity. It’s never made entirely clear why Zuckerberg decides to screw over the Winklevoss twins. They’re a few of the only people on campus that will actually speak to him and they give him a decent opportunity. But for many reasons Zuckerberg decides to take the offer the wrong way.

The first reason is the fact that the Winklevoss’s only allow him into the bike room of the Porcellian Club (the final club they’re a member of). The Winklevoss’s think they’re being incredibly generous by allowing Zuckerberg on such hallowed ground, but Zuckerberg takes it as a slight. He’s well aware that Jews are still treated like second class citizens in such places and his limited admittance only confirms his suspicions. Secondly, the Winklevoss’s are exactly the kind of people he wishes he could be - rich, good-looking, physically fit; they’re almost Aryan. Mark, on the other hand, is a misfit - a social reject, which makes it beautifully ironic that he goes on to create the most successful social networking site in the world. Thirdly, Mark does it because he thinks that he’s better than everyone else (an arrogance that is interestingly at odds with his inferiority complex). He doesn’t want to be an employee. He wants to be a boss. He won’t tolerate being bottom of the food chain. So Mark’s creation of The Facebook is also an inspired act of petulance. He wants to prove that he can make something on his own - he doesn’t need to be part of special clubs or have powerful friends. While most people of his age would resort to writing bad poetry or indulge in chronic masturbation, he uses his anger to begin the process of making himself a billionaire.

The process has its casualties, though. Zuckerberg hires his best friend (his only friend really) Eduardo Saverin as his business manager. Saverin gives his heart and soul to the business as well as quite a bit of money, but Zuckerberg’s head is turned by Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake), founder of Napster. Again, Parker is the kind of person that Zuckerberg wishes he could be - good looking, confident, good with women. But unlike the Winklevoss’s, Parker will take Mark all the way.

Timberlake is excellent as Parker, even though he’s basically just playing an extension of himself. He’s a cocky superstar - the kind of guy that men want to be and women want to be with. So the part isn’t exactly a stretch for Timberlake, but he still brings lots of charm and charisma to the role.

Parker’s seduction of Zuckerberg is the saddest thing about the film. Because of Parker, Zuckerberg ruins the one real friendship he has. This element of the film actually nicely encapsulates the problem with Facebook. Facebook allows us to have the illusion of friendship without having to deal with all the complications. We can friend someone but not really have to see them or talk to them on the phone or write them long emails or letters. We can stay in touch by occasionally looking at their wall or commenting on their status. Everything is a lot more shallow - it’s all less real. And that’s what Zuckerberg chooses. He chooses a shallow friendship over one with any real meaning.

One of the best scenes in the film is when Saverin visits Facebook in its swanky new offices (they’re about to celebrate the one millionth user). He thinks he’s there to celebrate but he’s there to sign papers because his 30% share of the business has been reduced to 0.03% due to restructuring. To make matters worse, all the other main players in Facebook still have a decent share of the business - Parker even has 7%. It’s the equivalent of being defriended and Saverin is understandably pissed off. He smashes Zuckerberg’s computer and says that he’s going to sue him. The coward that he is, Zuckerberg can only tremble. Parker, though, is over the moon - he verbally attacks Saverin. Well, until Saverin pretends that he’s going to punch him - at this point, Parker almost shits himself. But after Saverin’s left, Zuckerberg tells Parker that he was too rough on him. So Zuckerberg obviously still has feelings for his ex-friend, but he’s too much of a coward to stand up for him.

Again this accurately reflects current life, where conflict is avoided at all costs. We’d rather quietly defriend someone or ease them out of our lives than actually speak our minds. We don’t even have the option of a dislike button. Facebook and other social networking sites were supposed to bring us together but if anything they’ve driven us further apart.

But while the film is very timely, is it the all-conquering masterpiece that some people think it is? I wouldn’t go that far. It’s certainly one of the best films of the year, but that isn’t really saying that much, as it’s been a very lean year for cinema so far. However, it’s nice to see David Fincher returning to form after the disappointment that was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. That was a film that I sorely wanted to like but it fell way short of expectations. Thankfully, though, The Social Network is a film of subtle pleasures. As great as Fincher is, he sometimes gets carried away with the technique of making a film - the worst case being the unnecessarily flashy shots in Panic Room (flying through locks and such). Here he allows the film to speak for itself while still retaining his magnificent eye for visuals. The opening shots as Zuckerberg runs through Harvard are wonderful, as is the boat race at Henley (a scene that initially seems self-indulgent until you realise that it’s cleverly showing you that the Winklevoss’s are second best at everything). And the film also has an excellent score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (going back to the boat race, the score and the slow motion makes it feel like something out of A Clockwork Orange).

The final scene has Zuckerberg using Facebook to try and friend his ex-girlfriend. After sending the friend request, he refreshes the page every few seconds to see if his request has been accepted. Maybe he’s finally trying to make up for his mistakes or maybe he’s still a slave to his impulses. We don’t know. You can only hope that he’s learnt his lesson and that he understands that all the success and all the money in the world are meaningless if you don’t have any deep, lasting attachments.

Having said all that, go back to the top of the page and click on ‘like’ in my Facebook widget. And after that, donate me some money. It’ll do my self-esteem wonders and I promise that I’ll only use the money to bring you more reviews. I won’t use it on booze or whores. You have my word. I’ll be refreshing Facebook until you like me. Thanks in advance. :)

Pierrepoint

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 03:32:00 +0000

Albert Pierrepoint was one of the Britain’s last hangmen and was responsible for the executions of hundreds of convicted felons. The end titles of the film say that he killed 608 individuals but other sources say that he killed around 400. Either way it’s a hell of a lot of people to take to the gallows.

Pierrepoint begins with its protagonist attending training for his new profession. He’s shown the procedures and he’s quizzed on some of the finer points of the job (in order to break the neck cleanly, one has to adjust the length of the noose according to the person’s height, weight and build - otherwise the executioner runs the risk of decapitating the felon). The film doesn’t go into great detail about why he chooses this job. He just says that he has something in him.

Part of the reason that he has something in him is because his father was a hangman. An uncle also did the same job. Therefore you could say that it’s the family business. However, the film isn’t particularly interested in Pierrepoint’s past - it’s more interested in showing how this profession changes and twists him. The only meaningful reference to the past is when Pierrepoint speaks to his mother - she says that she wants to hear nothing about his new profession; she wouldn’t talk to Albert’s father about his job and she’s going to do the same with her son.

During his first execution, Pierrepoint is just an assistant, but the hangman he’s assisting loses his nerve and Albert has to take charge. He’s calm under pressure and the pleading of the prisoner doesn’t seem to affect him. He’s able to make the disconnect that the other guy can’t. There’s no emotional engagement in the killing.

A lack of emotion might suggest a lack of feeling, but that certainly isn’t the case with Pierrepoint. When he carries out an execution, he’s merely following orders. He doesn’t do it because he gets any pleasure out of killing a fellow human being. His pride comes from doing things professionally; from making things easy for everyone. And this professionalism means that he has respect for the condemned. As he says himself, they’ve paid the price - in death they become innocent once more. Indeed, he even cleans the bodies himself after he’s hung them, thinking that the morticians wouldn’t treat the executed properly.

There’s almost an erotic element in one of the scenes as he cleans the body of a woman. Given his rather passionless marriage, you can’t help but feel that this is the closest he gets to another human being. Getting to hold them, to clean them and to make sure that they’re treated with dignity, he achieves the intimacy he lacks with his wife - he only has an illusion of closeness with his spouse.

At first everything seems fine between Pierrepoint and his wife, but the marriage quickly turns into a sham. There’s one horrible point where she can’t even bear to be touched by him. She knows that these hands have touched the dead and she doesn’t want the stain on her.

Yet she does want his money. She’s the one who makes the plans and she’s the one who convinces him to buy a pub. It’s also her idea to capitalise on his celebrity and to use it to sell more booze. It’s a cold, distant marriage.

However, what’s so great about the film is how subtly this is done. On the outside they seem like the perfect team. He has the charm, she has the brains. And on first glimpses they seem to get along fine. But then you begin to see the contempt that his wife has for Albert. He repulses her. She looks in his book, the book where he lists all of his executions, and she can only think of the hundreds he’s killed. The only way she can get past it is to focus on the money - at more than one point she nags him about some money he’s owed for an execution he wasn’t allowed to carry out.

Things only come to a head because Albert is called to execute a friend of his. This particular development would be too ridiculous to accept if the film were fictitious, but it actually happened. A regular at Albert’s pub, a man who was a friendly acquittance of Pierrepoint, killed his lover and was then condemned to death. Not knowing his real name (Pierrepoint only knows his nickname), Albert has no idea he’s been called to execute a friend. This sequence is one of the most powerful in the film. Albert’s friend is scared that Pierrepoint won’t acknowledge him during the execution, but knowing that this would be an act of cruelty, Albert does acknowledge him and does everything to make his friend’s experience as painless as possible. The only problem is that the whole ordeal causes Albert a huge amount of anguish. Prior to this, the executions had a professional separation - here his private life and his professional life have become horribly blurred.

What makes the experience even more unbearable is that Albert’s wife doesn’t want to hear anything about it. Even when he’s sitting on the floor, bawling his eyes out, she can’t tell him that he’s not a bad man. She has exactly the same attitude as his mother and she refuses to give him any emotional support. This burden is his and his alone.

But although the execution of his friend is when Pierrepoint reaches his professional nadir, the rot begins long before this. At the end of the Second World War, Pierrepoint is called to Germany to execute Nazi POWs. In one day alone he’s called to kill fourteen people. Even for a professional like Pierrepoint, this is too much. The experience is too long and too intense. It also brings him unwanted celebrity. He can no longer leave Albert at the door as the condemned now know who Albert is - they even plead to him by name.

The film leaves you with an overwhelming amount of sadness for Pierrepoint. Here’s a man who brings dignity and professionalism to his job and who is then punished because of his competency for it. He never wants to be solely recognised as an executioner but even his wife can’t look past it. He takes the burden and then is rewarded for it with contempt and loneliness. It’s an emotional execution that is the polar opposite of the ones he carried out - it’s long, painful and cruel.

Directed by Adrian Shergold
Written by Bob Mills and Jeff Pope
Produced by Christine Langan
Original Music by Martin Phipps
Cinematography by Danny Cohen
Starring Timothy Spall, Juliet Stevenson and Eddie Marsan

Running Time: 90 mins

Rated R for disturbing images, nudity and synchronised hanging

Wall Street

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 21:49:00 +0000

Isn’t going to work every day wonderful? Getting up early in the morning, squashing yourself into a train full of flatulent commuters and then spending most of the day answering badly written, poorly thought-out emails. But things were even worse in the 80s. Back then you had to write letters and back then you didn’t have the consolation of an ipod on your trip home - your shuffles were only 60 minutes long, you had to switch sides halfway through and Westlife had yet to record an album. Those were dark days.

Despite this, Wall Street begins in a very jaunty fashion. Frank Sinatra plays on the soundtrack and the trials and tribulations of the morning routine are filmed with gentle exasperation - the opening seems to exude the American belief that if you work hard enough you’ll attain a comfortable level of prickdom and will no longer have to tolerate this daily abasement.

A believer in this extremely deluded conviction is Bud Fox, played by Charlie Sheen. He begins the film as a low-grade stockbroker, but he thinks that if he works hard enough, if he makes enough connections and kisses enough arse, he too will have a part of the American Dream. And even though most people would receive only a handful a scraps for humiliating themselves in this fashion (a minuscule pay rise, perhaps 10 days annual paid vacation instead of 5, or if they’re really good, their own cupboard-sized office), Fox actually gets some sizeable rewards for his toadying.

Fox goes from cold-calling old fogies in a loud, sweaty office to hobnobbing with the rich and powerful. And how does he do this? He does it by selling out his father.

Bud’s dad, played by Martin Sheen, works for an airline. He’s a blue-collar guy who likes to unwind after an honest, hard day’s work with a smoke and some beer. He’s the complete opposite of his white-collar son who likes nothing more than making his own pasta in his pretentious apartment with his vacuous girlfriend.

The temptation in this film is Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). He’s the Lucifer-type figure that tempts the innocent Fox to stray from the path of decency. He teaches Fox to love nothing but money and to indulge in the mindless pursuit of it. He also throws a woman his way and very quickly Fox becomes Gekko’s loyal lapdog.

Some of the funniest scenes in the film revolve around Fox’s attempts to modernise his apartment. He and his girlfriend staple some fake brickwork to a wall and then paint it to make it look rough and ready - like the plaster is peeling off the walls and exposing the brickwork underneath. It’s some of the most pretentious design I’ve ever seen but it’s presented here as desirable and cutting edge. There’s also a hilarious exchange where Daryl Hannah, who produces a performance so stunningly flat that it seems like consciousness is a foreign concept to her, says that she wants to do for furniture what Laura Ashley did for fabrics. You mean, produce horribly bland, middlebrow vomit? Yeah, fuck you.

And so it’s for these very meagre pleasures that Fox decides to sell out his father’s company and turn them over to the shark Gekko - a pretentious apartment and some vacant poontang.

It’s at this point that you realise that the film is nothing more than a blindingly obvious morality tale. What’s more important, family or money? Anyone with half a brain should know that family comes first. I mean, sure you can sell everyone out and become Donald Trump with a bowlful of Shredded Wheat on your head hawking crappy mattresses, but what kind of comfort does money provide? Well, aside from innumerable blow jobs and an endless supply of cocaine, not much.

Daddy Fox immediately sees through Gekko’s bullshit and knows that he only gives a fuck about money. Bud is a white collar prick who doesn’t know his arse from his elbow, while daddy is a pure, unclouded, blue collar saint who can see the world for what it really is.

Seeing as Bud’s father is played by Martin Sheen, Charlie’s real life father, you’d think that their scenes would have some authenticity about them. You’d be thinking wrong. There’s a particularly risible scene after his father has a heart attack where Charlie can only express his emotional distress by blinking. Clearly talent skips a generation.

Still, it’s fun watching Sheen’s performance and realising that Christian Bale stole lots of Bud’s inflections for his role as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.

The most fun thing about Wall Street is Gekko. Some of the crap he spews is priceless. My favourite line is, ‘If you want a friend, get a dog.’ Basically he wants people with no feelings. He’s a horrible, preposterous man, but he’s easily the most interesting thing in the film. His stupid, mindless pursuit of money represents everything that is wrong about America - the lack of feeling, the lack of compassion, the knuckleheaded belief that consumption is more important than understanding. It’s no wonder that he’s been the subject of endless parodies (Del Boy’s yuppie phase in Only Fools and Horses being the best by far).

A particularly hilarious Gekko moment is when he calls Bud early one morning to tell him how beautiful the sunrise looks from his beach. He says that no painting has ever been able to capture its beauty. His pomposity is off the chart. But what takes the scene to whole new level is that Bud seems to be having an orgasm on the other line - just look at his face; he’s lapping this crap up and spunking in his boxers.

More crap comes during Gekko’s ‘greed is good’ speech. He claims that he’s a liberator of companies. He claims that he’s rescuing them from bad management. He certainly has a point that managers are the bane of corporate life. Too many of them do too little for too much money. But Gekko is not a liberator. He’s an executioner. He’s there to cut everything up and take the spoils. He’s part of the destructive force of capitalism - he’s a leach that sucks the blood out of the economy; he doesn’t actually produce anything, he’s just a carpetbagger in a suit.

So the fact that Bud sees all of this but still looks up to Gekko for so long just shows what a stupid character he is. And when he finally does realise what’s going on, the film illustrates his mental anguish in the lamest way possible - Bud wakes surrounded by empty pizza boxes and wonky venetian blinds. Yeah, he’s seriously gone off the rails there.

Perhaps realising that it’s straining to come to a satisfying conclusion, the film ends with a silly fight in Central Park and then shows that Bud has set-up Gekko for prosecution (he’s been wearing a wire while Gekko makes incriminating statements). Yes, occasionally a Gekko or a Madoff gets prosecuted, but some things never change. Money never sleeps and shit always smells. (To my eternal disappointment, the title Wall Street: Shit Always Smells was rejected for the upcoming sequel.)

Directed by Oliver Stone
Written by Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone
Produced by Edward R. Pressman
Original Music by Stewart Copeland
Cinematography by Robert Richardson
Starring Charlie Sheen, Michael Douglas, Daryl Hannah, Martin Sheen and Terence Stamp

Running Time: 126 mins

Rated R for language, brief nudity and fucking yuppies

How to Get Ahead in Advertising

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 02:04:00 +0000

In Withnail and I, Bruce Robinson made one of the funniest films there is. Therefore it was always going to be hard for him to make anything that would equal his debut. However, in How to Get Ahead in Advertising he comes mighty close.

The reason why Robinson's second film fails to match Withnail and I is because it’s far too preachy. There are some great speeches in the film; some wonderful digs at consumerism, but occasionally it descends into uninteresting ranting. Yeah consumerism can turn us into unthinking automatons, and yeah big business is greedy, but you don't really need to point it out so blatantly. We already know this. The film works much better when it illustrates the BS or when it jabs at it. It doesn't need to get on its high horse.

One of my favourite bits is when Bagley (Richard E. Grant) – a cocky advertising executive who suddenly loses his magic touch of selling absolute crap when he has to hawk some boil cream – is listening to a bunch of idiots talking about a newspaper article. As a person who makes a living out of lying, he's appalled that they believe what the press tells them. They then begin to argue (there's a great bit when an Irish priest insists that a woman in a vice den had peanut butter smeared across her tits; it was in the paper so it must be true) and the conversation quickly turns to the boil cream that Bagley has become obsessed with. "They're incurable, all of them. I know that and so does everybody else. Until they get one. Then the rules suddenly change." And then he has a dig at the priest. "They want to believe something works. He knows that, which is why he gets a good look-in with the dying." It's a great scene; it's funny as hell and it also has a good point to make. People consume less out of desire and more out of a desperate sort of hope, or even fear; they hope this product or that product will fill the hole in their lives. They hope it will be the answer to all their problems. And thankfully this scene refrains from the preaching that affects the latter stages.

It’s also a devilish idea to have Bagley become obsessed with boils and boil cream. He himself is a boil – as an advertising executive he’s an ugly pimple and highly resistant to any attempts at removal.

But my favourite scene is the one with the psychiatrist – Bagley has quit his job and developed a hideous boil of his own, one that talks to him and one that has grown a face. He's talking to the quack with a big bandage on his shoulder. He rants for a while about the way advertisers have ruined television, and then all of a sudden, after a silence, the boil speaks. The way it's presented in the film, the boil (at first) has a separate voice to Bagley's. He's not portrayed as Gollum with a satanic pimple; he's not talking to himself – the boil is a separate entity. But at the same time you're never really sure whether you're seeing things from Bagley's perspective. He's gone totally crazy, so he may very well be the one saying all this crap. Plus the boil only speaks when Bagley's not looking the other person in the face. But what I love about the scene is the filth the boil speaks and Grant's reactions. His hysteria is hilarious (there's another magnificent bit of hysteria in the film – when the boil first 'speaks', Bagley is so shocked that he runs to the kitchen, shaking and spazzing like he's got St Vitus' dance. Grant is amazing at working himself up into a lather). And then the boil asks Bagley to tell the shrink about his grandfather. "My grandfather was caught molesting a wallaby in a private zoo in 1919." "A wallaby?" "It may have been a kangaroo. I'm not sure." "You mean sexually?" "I suppose so. He had his hand in its pouch." I haven't heard dialogue that funny in a long time.

I also love the scene when Bagley is admitted to hospital to have the boil lanced. By now he's completely raving. He's going on and on about the evils of consumerism. So then the boil says, "You commies don't half talk a lot of shit." Magnificent! It's the sort of argument a Daily Mail reader would give. Criticise capitalism and you must be a Red. However, I can see where the boil is coming from. There are certainly times when Robinson is too militant. Like I said before, he really doesn't need to stand so high on his soapbox. But at the same time the film makes some excellent points. It's just that the film works better when it does it through comedy rather than rhetoric.

Another great scene, one that takes a poke at society's hypocrisy, is when Bagley argues with a feminist who thinks men should bleed. "And I think you're a vegan who eats meat in secret. You see, she doesn't deny it. She's a vegan who eats meat in secret!" "I do not eat meat!" "But you'll eat fish, you'll eat fish until the cows come home." "Fish is allowed!" Of course, this enrages Bagley.

But although hypocritical lefties get a kicking too, the film, early on, raises an interesting point. If you're anti-consumerism, how do you spread your message without advertising? It's a bit of a kick in the teeth, that.

However, Robinson is smart enough to know that consumerism is here to stay. The film doesn't end with any hope. All we can look forward to is more advertising, more spending and more products. The world is one magnificent shop indeed.

Directed by Bruce Robinson
Written by Bruce Robinson
Produced by David Wimbury
Original Music by David Dundas and Rick Wentworth
Cinematography by Peter Hannan
Starring Richard E.Grant, Rachel Ward and Richard Wilson

Running Time: 94 mins

Rated 15 for fast eruptors, peanut butter smeared across tits and pork pies in bags

The Cove

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 14:19:00 +0000

Here’s a weird piece of information. My uncle thought that dolphins were aliens from another planet. He thought that they were smarter than humans. Now bear in mind, this is a man that every Christmas would pass out in our armchair, drooling Carlsberg Special Brew from the corner of his mouth as he respired loudly while wearing a silly paper hat. I’m not saying that alcohol may have prejudiced his thinking, but...

Regardless of whether you think dolphins are Flippers from Mars or not, you have to admit that they’re pretty cool. They swim in the ocean, they protect sailors from sharks and Krakens, they make sick children and fat Floridians smile, they jump through hoops, they help the Navy. Is there anything dolphins can’t do?

Well, aside from writing literature and running the 100m, it seems like dolphins’ greatest failure is not escaping the clutches of the Japanese.

Ah, the Japanese. They’ve given us so many great things over the years – quality electronics, cars and videogames, and of course Kurosawa, Mishima, Ozu and Maru. But on the opposite end of the spectrum they’ve given us humiliation TV and lots of depraved porn; sickening stuff that’s so ashamed of itself that the cocks have spontaneously self-pixelated. Honestly, if I were a cute young girl on a Japanese train wearing an innocent little blouse and plaid skirt, I’d be worried that the very second that the doors closed a hundred blurry penises would be thrust in my face.

Japan’s also a nation that seems determined to eat and kill everything in sight. They harpoon whales and slaughter horses with reckless abandon. And then for a real good laugh, they spear some dolphins.

It takes a while to get to it, but the final part of The Cove packs a fair wallop. After lots of bullshit from various people (there’s talk about being able to scientifically kill the dolphins – apparently they can be killed with a single blow), we see how it really happens. Men in boats with spears methodically stab the dolphins. There’s no science to it. There’s no method. Men just hack and stab at the water until everything stops moving. But it takes a long time to achieve this. The water turns red and dolphins thrash in the water. It seems like the stupidest, most barbaric, most inefficient way to kill something.

The only reason that this footage is captured is because of the work of a group of individuals who decide to expose the killing that is taking place – the slaughter occurs out of sight and anyone who tries to take a look is either intimidated or encounters physical violence. It takes an undercover operation to bring it to light.

The surveillance operation feels like part spy thriller, part heist movie. There’s lots of night-vision and there’s more than one close call. In one scene, as the guys and girls bug the cove, some guards come along to intercept them. The way it’s filmed, you’re never quite sure how close the guards get, but the scene certainly gets the pulse racing. After all, this is a country that legally allows its police officers to torture suspects, so you can more than understand their rush to get out of Dodge.

One reason why the movie feels so much like a spy thriller is because the movie industry actually gets involved with the operation – a number of the team are special effects guys. So they deploy all kinds of cool ways of bugging the cove. My favourite are the cameras that are hidden in fake rocks that are planted in the cliffs.

But the real hero of the picture is Ric O’Barry. Formerly a dolphin capturer and trainer, and largely responsible for the success of the TV show Flipper, he’s turned his life around and now works to free captive dolphins. Largely responsible for this transformation is his belief that one of the real life Flippers committed suicide in his arms – unlike humans, dolphins have to consciously choose to breathe and the one in question just decided to stop. Understandably, this devastated him and he’s been a changed man since.

When we first see Ric O’Barry, he seems crazy. He wears masks over his face, he’s paranoid about cars following him and he’s constantly shifting back and forth. But it quickly becomes clear that this paranoia is justified. Harassed at every turn by policemen and angry fishermen, he survives through a sheer act of will. It’s truly impressive to see a man that is this dedicated to his cause. O’Barry won’t be intimidated and he won’t be swayed. Time after time men try and provoke him into reacting against them so that they can get him locked up, but he stays strong. And in some parts it even becomes amusing. For the hundredth time some cops decide to have a chat with him. They want to know whether he’s working with anyone to expose the activity in the cove but instead he starts talking about mercury levels. It’s obvious that they’ve heard this hundreds of times before and rather than listen to him again they quickly make their excuses and leave. It’s a brilliant piece of chess from O’Barry – he plays up to his image as a crackpot in order to protect everyone else.

But the mercury point is a big issue. Dolphin meat contains large levels of mercury and is poisonous to humans. And yet a Japanese school feeds its children dolphin meat and packets and packets of the stuff finds its way onto supermarket shelves. Anyone who eats it is slowly being killed.

The majority of the populace seems to be unaware of the dolphin killing practice but the politicians jealously protect it. They claim that it’s a form of pest control. In reality, it’s because the activity makes money – any dolphin that can be trained can fetch up to $150,000 and the rest can be slaughtered and sold for meat. And Japan gets away with it because they buy votes at the International Whaling Commission and because they don’t listen to what anyone else says.

The bubble is burst, though, when O’Barry bursts into a meeting with a video screen strapped to his chest. The video shows footage of the slaughter and O’Barry makes sure that everyone sees it. It brilliantly cuts through the bullshit and it rams the point of the movie home. There’s no ambiguity or objectivity here. This practice is fucking wrong.

Directed by Louie Psihoyos
Written by Mark Monroe
Produced by Paula DuPré Pesman and Fisher Stevens
Original Music by J. Ralph
Cinematography by Brook Aitken
Film Editing by Geoffrey Richman

Running Time: 92 mins

Rated PG-13 for disturbing content, including ritualised dolphin slaughter

Predators

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 20:51:00 +0000

Here’s a question for you. How does a man get transported to an alien planet where he’s hunted for sport and still manage to put on weight? It seems to me that being a human fox in a place that has a total absence of Popeyes and Wendy’s would be a recipe for weight loss, not weight gain. But then I guess I hadn’t figured on the gluttony of Laurence Fishburne. Apparently nothing will get in the way of him and his stomach.

Fishburne plays an Air Cavalry veteran who was kidnapped by the Predators and now hides in an abandoned spacecraft. He’s been stuck there for years and has lost his mind. Well, as you would if you were being hunted daily by giant aliens with dreadlocks and you faced the dire future of never visiting Tops Diner again for their wonderful Top of the World Burger. But Fishburne’s madness isn’t exactly subtle. He has crazy eyes and talks to himself. Presumably he spends all day trying to order a Double Down with no success.

Considering the fame of the actor and his prominence in the marketing campaign, I thought that Fishburne was going to be a main character, but no sooner does he turn up than he gets killed. However, there is an amusing scene where he tries to kill the humans that he’s harbouring in his spacecraft. He says to himself that he can’t feed all these mouths (yes, there is nothing a fat bloater fears more than the prospect of precious food entering a skinny fuck’s undeserving gut) and then tries to smoke them to death. Yeah, you heard me right. He tries to smoke them to death. No burning. No bashing. No blasting. I guess he’s trying to cook them. After all, if you’re in space with no Baconaise or Donut Burgers, what better treat than some human flesh? It must make a welcome change after eating nothing but bits of spacecraft and your own poo.

On the other hand, there are Predator Dogs that he could eat. But these creatures don’t look especially tasty. They’re full of giant tusks that would gouge your eyes out and rip your nose off if you decided to be overly zealous and ate one without having a hacksaw handy. Hell, now that I think about it, how the fuck do the Predator Dogs eat their prey? How are you supposed to get something’s flesh in your mouth when you have a giant tusk blocking your gob? Complete design nonsense.

Not that the action scene featuring the Predator Dogs is anything to write home about. A bunch of these poorly rendered beasts chase the antagonists (a motley assortment of the world’s best killers) and then get killed by machine gun fire. But what makes the scene laughable is in the way that the dogs get killed. There’s a bit where a Russian with a mini-gun shoots at one of the animals for like five seconds and doesn’t even hit a dog running straight at him. These guys are worse shots than the A-Team.

To be honest, none of the action is particularly spectacular. It ranges from ho-hum gun battles to ponderous Predator fisticuffs to silly sword fights. Yep, there’s one scene where a Yakuza fights a Predator with a katana. It’s as ridiculous as it sounds and it even takes place in a field of barley. Or should that be, Predator barley? Regardless, the scene is preposterous and not at all exciting. And it also seems to me that the Predators have become significantly easier to kill, as the Yakuza guy manages to slay his bigger, stronger foe in one-on-one combat. Fair enough, the Yakuza guy also dies, but the Predators no longer seem to be so fearsome.

Hell, even Adrien Brody manages to decapitate one of the dreadlocked aliens. Although having said this, Brody is no longer the skinny bastard he once was. He has now become uber diesel. It’s quite a sight to behold once we see him without his shirt on. He stands there caked in mud, doing his best Arnie impression, and then proceeds to beat the living shit out of a Predator before eventually decapitating it. It actually ends up being quite awesome, especially as this is an Oscar winning character actor. What next, Paul Giamatti in the next Alien film, slaying xenomorphs with a GShG-7.62 machine gun?

But I don’t know why the film is so coy to show us Brody’s muscles. He obviously worked pretty hard to get them. So why deny us the modern equivalent of the awesome, muscle-bulging Dillon/Dutch handshake? Or the totally over the top but necessary gratuitous jungle-trap-building-scene where the cast ripped their shirts off so that we could have close-ups of bulging muscles as they sweated under the sun? That shit was dope! – as my friend King D would say.

But no, this is a modern film and avoids homoeroticism like the plague (bastards!). So we have a film that is pretty much played straight down the middle. There are no glorious puns, no over the top violence and not a hint of gayness. As such the film is pretty charmless. True, I wasn’t trying to gouge my eyes out like I did when I tried to watch the Aliens vs. Predator films, but it’s nowhere near as fun as the original movie. And it’s probably not even as fun as the second one. Fuck, that film had Gary Busey in it! What does this film have? Topher Grace? And Topher Grace as a serial killer. The less said about that, the better...

Jaws

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 23:13:00 +0000

Some people argue that Jaws ruined cinema. It was the first massive summer blockbuster and it paved the way for the nonsense that followed - high concept, big budget, fast food movies for people with short attention spans and less than discerning taste. It completely changed the landscape of the movie industry.

Whether you think this change is a good thing or bad thing depends on if you’re a drooling fanboy or someone with a modicum of intelligence. I know there are people who jizz in their pants at every big movie release. They watch the trailers, they read the news on excitable blogs and they go to the opening weekends, crying inside as they realise that the latest future movie classic starring Ryan Reynolds and Scarlett Johansson isn’t The Godfather. Hell, it isn’t even The Poseidon Adventure. But despite this they’ll still try and convince themselves and others that it is. They’ll artificially inflate the score on IMDb and they’ll nod in agreement with that fuckwit Harry Knowles. Yes The Dark Time Traveling Matrix of Wonderland was really a life changing experience.

For other folk, summer movie season is a time for despair. A time when nothing decent seems to be showing. But even though Jaws helped usher this in, we shouldn’t think less of the film. Jaws is fantastic entertainment and proof that it’s hard to make a big mainstream flick. Producers these days seem to think that there’s a magic formula, but there isn’t. The vast majority of them aren’t going to make anything that comes anywhere near close to the genius of Jaws.

One of the things that helped Jaws was that the special effects were rubbish. This meant that the filmmakers had to be a little more imaginative about the way that they filmed the shark sequences. They couldn’t just show the rubber Great White right from the beginning; the suspense would have been ruined. Instead we see lots of point of view shots and we get to see the results of the carnage.

Had Jaws been filmed today, we probably would have seen the shark in the very first reel, even if Spielberg had been director. Drunk with the possibilities of CGI, the focus would have been on pointless money shots instead of suspense.

But is CGI even better than the effects we have here? Sure, towards the end, as the shark performs increasingly outrageous acts, the effects look dodgy. Just take the mechanical gnashing as he eats Quint or the shark torpedo as he crashes into the sinking boat in order to eat Brody. The effects don’t look remotely real. But did the effects in Deep Blue Sea look real either? Not at all. And at least here there are one or two amazing shots of the shark. Easily the most effective is the first reveal. The attacks at the beginning are unseen, but during the 4th July celebrations we get our first glimpse of the monster. We see it from above as it goes to attack a man in a small rowing boat. The water is dirty and the shark doesn’t perform any acrobatics, but in this one shot it looks completely real. And it makes the scene quite chilling. The thought that there’s this monster in the water, waiting to eat you, has certainly made me more reluctant to dip my feet in the ocean. That there is a sign of an effective film.

As mentioned before, later scenes with the shark aren’t quite as powerful. For instance, the moment when the shark reveals itself to Brody. Yes it’s a big surprise, but the shark, chomping thin air, kind of looks like it has Bell’s Palsy. Far scarier are the scenes where we don’t actually see the shark but feel its presence. For instance, the scene where Quint talks about the Indianapolis. Now the scene is amazing for many reasons. One of the many reasons I love it is because of the scar contest that the characters have - you can feel the characters bonding and this of course makes you care more about them. But it’s also a great scene because of the sense of dread it fills you with. Quint talks about his ship being sunk after delivering the H-Bomb - trapped in the Pacific waters with rescue a long way away, sharks feed on the men. It conveys far more terror than any of the action scenes and gives all of the characters an added layer of depth. Before this they’re all kind of one note (stuck up policeman, crazy seadog and cynical oceanographer) but after this they all kind of change - they finally realise what they’re up against and you’re more invested in them as people.

Other scenes are a bit more mechanical in the scares they create. A prime example is the scene where Brody and Hooper search for the shark at night. As they travel through the waters they stumble upon the boat of a fisherman. Of course, Hooper decides he has to investigate and dives into the water to check the hull of the boat. As he’s checking it, the dead body of the fisherman leers out. It’s a blatant, shameless attempt to make you jump (Spielberg actually tinkered with it, knowing that he still had one big scare left in the film) but it works like gangbusters.

Something that’s easy to forget when talking about Jaws is how funny it is. The dialogue is incredibly pithy and it helps give the film lots of life and energy. I also like the politics of the film - Brody is helpless in the face of a stupid Mayor who will put money before people. But even though he could be a simple villain, even the stupid Mayor has a little depth to him. He just wants his town and its people to prosper and as such ends up putting lives on the line. In one particularly amusing scene, during the 4th July as the fearful beachgoers remain safely on the sand, he encourages a family to enter the water - it kind of reminded me of when a British politician made his child eat a burger to prove that British beef was safe and that we wouldn’t all get Mad Cow’s Disease. He’s just trying to make sure that the celebrations proceed as normal and that the town has a good holiday season, but his recklessness ends up costing lives.

Another scene that gives me a laugh is the introduction of Quint. In the middle of a typically silly and short-sighted town meeting, he runs his fingers down a blackboard and says that for a sizeable sum of money, he’ll catch the shark –he’s the guy who knows exactly what the problem is and how to solve it. Of course, seeing as the town is run by a shyster who likes to cut corners, his offer isn’t taken up. Once again the Mayor puts money before people.

But Quint is by far the most interesting character in the film. And watching the film for the first time in years, it’s kind of remarkable that he’s only really in the final half of the film. It just goes to show how strong his presence is that he’s the first thing I remember when I think of Jaws.

What makes Quint such a likeable character is how much fun Robert Shaw seems to be having. But this doesn’t mean that Shaw is overacting or playing the buffoon. Quint feels legitimately coarse and dangerous. But at the same time, he also has a nurturing side to him. He helps Brody and even comes to like Hooper (thanks largely to the Indianapolis scene).

Speaking of Hooper and Quint, there’s an excellent class war between the two. Quint represents the working class, learn things through experience ethos, and Hooper represents technology and book learning. Neither of them are wrong, but initially they clash. There’s even an amusing bit where Quint downs a beer in one go and then crushes his can. In response, Hooper downs a paper cup and also crushes it. In some ways, the relationship is even like father and son. Hooper constantly feels the need to prove himself and only after much effort does he gain the respect of the old man.

But like I said earlier, neither of their approaches are wrong. Both experience and technology should be embraced. And Quint eventually learns this. Too bad, though, that he only learns it minutes before disappearing down the gullet of a Great White.

The ending of the film, with Brody literally blowing the shark up, should be completely laughable and preposterous, but somehow the young Spielberg has a way of making even the silliest things both plausible and enjoyable. We shouldn’t root for the destruction of sharks, but you can’t help but clutch the air as this fish explodes into a bloody mess. Somehow man manages to triumph against nature. But man shouldn’t let this success go to his head. The key to our survival is education and intelligence. Although a big gun and a gas tank also come in handy sometimes...

Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb
Produced by David Brown and Richard D. Zanuck
Original Music by John Williams
Cinematography by Bill Butler
Starring Roy Shcneider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss

Running Time: 124 mins

Rated PG for little boys and little dogs being eaten by a rubber shark turd

Inception

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 04:12:00 +0000

Christopher Nolan is riding the crest of a wave. Revered in indie circles for Memento and adored by the masses for The Dark Knight, he’s quickly becoming a superstar director. Needless to say, people were literally wetting themselves at the prospect of his latest film, Inception. Complete with flying actors, trains rolling down streets and a booming soundtrack, the trailer was a sight to behold. Had I been a little less jaded and wankerish, I might have wet myself too.

Sadly these stunning visuals are the best thing about the film. The story is bogged down with mind-numbing exposition and the emotional arc is melodramatic to say the least.

Loosely resembling both a James Bond film and The Matrix, Inception concerns a group of thieves who travel into people’s dreams in order to extract valuable information. But an important Japanese businessman called Saito (Ken Watanabe) asks them to do much more than this. He doesn’t just want Leonardo DiCaprio’s merry gang to steal information; he wants them to go into someone’s mind and plant an idea – an operation called inception.

The target is Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy). He’s the heir to a lucrative energy monopoly and Saito wants DiCaprio’s gang to plant the idea that Fischer, upon his father’s death, should break it up. The rationale is that the energy monopoly is bad for everyone but the reality is that Saito doesn’t want to go out of business and would like the opportunity to take over.

Reading the basic premise, the film sounds interesting, but the reality doesn’t necessarily synch with the concept. Most of the problem with the film is that Nolan is incapable of setting up the world in an interesting way. It’s kind of the antithesis of The Matrix where everything was done with ease (too bad they fucked up royally with the sequels). All the talk of dreams within dreams and kicks and totems and projections feel remarkably laboured and clunky. The film can honestly be split into two halves – it’s awesome when people aren’t speaking but it’s a drag when they are.

One of the main offending scenes is when DiCaprio is showing Ellen Page’s character the dream world. Again I feel compelled to draw comparisons with the Wachowskis’ film. When Morpheus is showing Neo around the matrix, everything is presented simply and clearly – you get the idea instantly. With Inception, though, it feels awkward and ill-conceived. A good film doesn’t have to waste lots of time on endless exposition. Everything should unfold simply and clearly. This never happens with Nolan’s film.

I get particularly annoyed when films seem to be making things up as they go along. It’s a cheap way of getting around problems with the narrative and it’s a way of papering over cracks. This feeling of things being made up as they go along is particularly apparent in Inception. First of all you have the idea that individuals can go into other people’s dreams – fair enough, this is a cool idea. Then you find out that you can have dreams within dreams and then equally out of nowhere we find out that if you go really deep into someone’s dreams you can go to limbo. All of these concepts are fine but the construction of the story is lacklustre; you never feel that the filmmakers have a firm grasp of the rules of this world. You feel like they’ll bend and change them to serve themselves rather than the story.

Another lacklustre aspect of Inception is the emotional arc. DiCaprio and his wife fool around with this dream world and end up in limbo. DiCaprio eventually ends up discovering that he’s living a dream but his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) won’t accept it. In order to get them to return to reality, DiCaprio performs inception and plants the idea in Mal’s head that she’s not living in the real world: by killing themselves while in limbo, they’ll return to reality. The only problem is that DiCaprio’s idea has stuck and the awoken Mal refuses to believe the reality of her existence. Again, writing this down, it sounds like an interesting idea, but once again the execution is lacking.

One key problem is the lack of chemistry between Leonardo DiCaprio and Marion Cotillard. They never feel like a convincing couple. But more damning than this is the ludicrous melodrama that forms the basis of many of their scenes. I was particularly amused by Mal’s idea for her and her husband to commit suicide together. She goes to all the effort of booking hotel rooms that face one another. This way she and her hubby can jump out of the window at the same time in glorious synchronised suicide. But it just seems like such a convoluted way of doing it. You have to find a hotel that has facing rooms and which both look down into a vertiginous drop. Why not just buy a gun or sit in a bathtub and drop a toaster into the water? I guess those options just aren’t romantic enough…

I also had to laugh when DiCaprio visited his dream world and we got to see what he has locked in the basement. Again it’s the hotel room where his wife killed herself and sure enough Mal is down there. But while the beginning of the scene is very well done (it has a creepy Shining vibe), it’s spoiled by melodrama. Mal goes crazy and then DiCaprio escapes into an elevator and keeps his wife locked down below. Yes I understand the symbolism but the execution of the scene is lacking and had me giggling like a girl. Yeah, keep your wo-man locked in the basement where she belongs!

Another laugh came when Leonardo DiCaprio gets stuck in the gap between buildings while trying to escape some bad guys. Yes this is the kind of thing that often happens in dreams (although the sequence is meant to take place in reality) but I couldn’t help but feel it was a jab at DiCaprio’s puffy physique. Got wedged between some buildings, you fat bastard!

Okay, so I’ve spent quite a bit of time bitching about the film but it certainly does have lots of things going for it. The action is often amazing and the visuals are stunning too. One of my favourite visuals is that of a train rampaging through some city streets. It’s an unusual juxtaposition but it’s filmed in such a matter of fact way that it’s only after a few seconds that you realise that a huge train should not be in this environment.

I also love some of the imagery in the opening sequence – especially the water bursting through the walls. And it’s also quite amazing how much the opening few minutes feel like a James Bond movie. For some reason I couldn’t help but think it felt like a modern You Only Live Twice. And speaking of James Bond, the snow sequence near the end of the movie has a huge Bond vibe. However, this sequence is less effective – by this point I was getting serious action fatigue.

The best scene, though, is the zero gravity fight. It wipes the floor with anything that The Matrix could come up with and I was constantly asking myself how they filmed it. It’s an amazing sequence.

Something else that I liked was how immoral the story is. Cillian Murphy’s character is being conned into breaking up his company, so therefore the heroes are behaving like massive pricks. Saito might pretend that this mission is to help everyone and break up a monopoly but its aim is to really set up another one.

But in the end, these pluses aren’t anywhere near enough to convince me that the film is some kind of modern masterpiece. The film is flawed as fuck. Hell, I think I might even prefer Insomnia…

The Running Man

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Roma) — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 01:01:00 +0000

If you were a child of the 80s, there's a good chance that at school you were lent a copy of The Running Man. And there's also a pretty good chance that you thought it was the dog's bollocks. But now that the decade of excess homoeroticism has been left behind, and now that easily pleased children have grown up, it's clear that The Running Man is pretty, well, crap.

The Running Man's most obvious shortcoming is its production values. Runners run around in quilted suits that resemble mattresses, glass lollipops serve as the ominous warning beacons that mark the point of no return for prisoners who don't want to have their heads blown off, Dynamo drives about in a car that appears to be made of Lego, fascist soldiers capture criminals with the terror that is a small red net, the wasteland that is the game quadrant appears to repeat itself Hanna-Barbera style and the opening crawl looks like it was typed on a BBC Micro. It's a cheap, cheap film.

However, despite the fact that it's cheap, despite the fact that it looks like sludge was smeared over the lenses, despite the fact that it was filmed by Detective Dave Starsky and despite the fact that the film repeats the words 'uplink', 'relay', 'network', 'interface', 'satellite' and 'resistance' so many times that I want to remove them from the dictionary Newspeak-style, there's still plenty to enjoy. The film's the epitome of a guilty pleasure.

What you most expect from an 80s Arnie film is homoeroticism, and in that regard the film certainly delivers. The first shot of Arnie (post Bakersfield massacre) is of him carrying a massive steel girder on his shoulder (it's a repeat of the shot in Commando where you're introduced to Schwarzenegger with the visual of him carrying a huge log). Sure he's probably got a micropenis, but let us buy into the fantasy - this man is hung like a shire horse and you viewer are nothing but a pathetic girly man who would wither and die when faced with the awesomeness of the Austrian Oak. And just to prove how virile Arnie is, no sooner has the film started than he's grabbing men by their privates and smoking unfeasibly large cigars.

All of this is certainly very stimulating for Killian, the Bobby Heenan-style game show presenter who hosts The Running Man. When he first sees Arnie, running in dreamy slow-motion with muscles-a-bulging, he says, "Hello gorgeous." And in the course of this scene he also says, "Isn't he beautiful?" and shouts, "I want him!" I bet he's got a steel girder in his pants. But when he first meets Arnie face to face he coos, "Hi, cutie pie." I think I'm getting a steel girder too.

But as log-friendly as this banter is, it's amateur league punk stuff when you compare it to the Captain Freedom workout. Jesse Ventura appears on the screen, shouting, "Are you ready for pain? Are you ready for suffering? If the answer is yes, then you're ready for Captain Freedom's workout." Sure there are some women in the background that you're supposed to be gently ogling, but they're clearly just window dressing. Jesse is the main course and his is the body that the camera lingers on. Hell, the scene might as well have have flashing lights and sirens, 'Butt sex is a painful but glorious workout!'

Another great detail is Arnie's disguise when he's on the run from the law. He walks around with a thick beard, a gym t-shirt (which is ripped to show as much of his neck and biceps as possible) and a yellow builder's hat. Maybe he ransacked the local YMCA.

But the film also delivers in terms of amusing deaths. Of course, the most obvious are the stalker deaths. You've got Fireball exploding, Sub-Zero wearing a barbed wire necktie, Dynamo being electrocuted (mid-rape) in his saggy kecks, and, best of all, Buzzsaw getting castrated – I love his falsetto scream. But you've also got a prisoner having his head blown off (while his body keeps running), and, my personal favourite, Killian going through a sign in that toboggan thing. But what makes the Killian death my favourite is the way the sign explodes when Killian goes through it. It's totally unnecessary but that's what makes it great.

Just as unnecessary are Arnie's atrocious puns. But their awfulness is what makes them so brilliant. "He had to split." "What a hot head." "Yeah, he was a pain in the neck." Even Roger Moore would be proud. But Arnie's best piece of dialogue is considerably more subtle. After Yaphet Kotto dies, and after he's made an offer by Killian to become a stalker, Arnie grabs a camera and yells, "I live to see you eat that contract, but I hope you leave enough room for my fist because I'm going to ram it into your stomach and break your goddamn spine!" Poetry.

Not quite as poetic, though, is the final shoot-out. Basically Arnie and a bunch of soldiers who look like members of Culture Club invade the studio and reveal the truth regarding this fascistic society. It's a dull action scene (although I like the way that Arnie, like Charles Bronson, can avoid bullets simply by ducking). Plus Arnie, for some reason, spares the bloodthirsty mob. Surely I can't be the only one that was hoping he'd open fire on the crowd – especially on that old granny – and establish a Ben Richards dictatorship? But no, in a typically un-Republican way, Arnie wants freedom. And he also gets the girl and walks off with her to the sound of some abysmal 80s power ballad. Personally, I think it would have been more convincing if he'd walked off arm-in-arm with Killian's bodyguard, Sven.

Directed by Paul Michael Glaser
Screenplay by Steven E. de Souza
Produced by George Linder and Tim Zinnemann
Original Music by Harold Faltermeyer
Cinematography by Thomas Del Ruth
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Maria Conchita Alonso, Yaphet Kotto, Jim Brown and Jesse Ventura

Running Time: 101 mins

Rated R for quilted tracksuits, comedy deaths and repressed homosexuality