tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33214029742110829882024-02-20T10:15:05.656-08:00Of All the Film Blogs...Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.comBlogger145125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-63471701923200314482016-07-13T03:15:00.001-07:002016-07-13T03:15:34.656-07:00AU REVOIR<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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So, after more than three and half years of reviews, analysis, and general ruminations I'm bidding farewell to Of All the Film Blogs.</div>
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Apart from a handful of very early pieces at university, it was here I did my first real film criticism and, if you're reading this, whether or not you've just stumbled across it, you've played at least a small part in supporting me. Every jump in the number of pageviews has helped give me an incentive to keep writing, so thank you.</div>
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I hope you'll continue to seek out my work at my new site, Of All the Film Sites (www.ofallthefilmsites.com).</div>
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For now, though: here's looking at you all.</div>
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Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-18017993082941000422016-06-28T16:51:00.000-07:002016-06-28T16:54:02.343-07:00ELVIS & NIXON<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="s1">How do you a find a new take on not one but two of the most imitated figures in modern history? From <i>Forrest Gump</i> to <i>Bubba Ho-Tep</i>, <i>Secret Honour </i>to <i>X-Men: Days of Future Past</i>, not to mention the cavalcade of films that bear their names, Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon are probably better known to us as personas than in person; partly by design, of course. </span>Whether it’s the howling lycanthropic Nixon of <i>Futurama </i>or the gyrating heartthrob of <i>Jailhouse Rock</i>, only the core mannerisms remain in memory: the hunched back and beady-eyed stare; that cocky sneer and “a-thank you, thank you very much”. Though hardly an in-depth “character study”, <i>Elvis & Nixon </i>succeeds in getting — albeit shallowly — under the skin of both its leads. </div>
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<span class="s1">The film details the lead-up to the meeting that took place between the king of rock n’ roll and “Tricky Dick” on December 21st, 1970. It all began a few days earlier when Elvis (Michael Shannon) suddenly left Graceland and flew to Washington DC with the stated aim of becoming an undercover “Agent at Large” with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs — in order to combat the rise of drug culture in the United States, don’t you know. </span>Accompanied by two of his so-called Mafia Memphis, Jerry Schilling (Alex Pettyfer) and lookalike Sonny West (Johnny Knoxville), he set about trying to secure some face time with the man he thought most likely to make it happen: President Richard Nixon (Kevin Spacey). </div>
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Fortunately for Elvis, Nixon’s staff happens to include Egil Krogh (Colin Hanks), head of the Special Investigations Unit, and Deputy Assistant Dwight Chapin (Evan Peters). Both appreciate the positive impact an association with Elvis could have on Nixon’s appeal to the younger generation; even if White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman (Tate Donovan in cameo) takes some convincing. Krogh and Chapin make for an amiable pair of squares — they even have matching overcoats — but Watergate is on the horizon. </div>
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<span class="s1">Elvis, meanwhile, has grown disillusioned with the life he leads. The film, directed by Lisa Johnson, never delves into his obsession with law enforcement, but it’s clear that this a man for whom the giggling women (when he’s there they giggle) and expensive jewellery (he’s a prisoner of his fashion regime) have lost their charm; even if he never does. </span><span class="s1">His former associate Jerry — half handler, half friend — truly loves Elvis, but feels himself being drawn back into the orbit of a man who can’t help but be the centre of everyone else’s world. </span><br />
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Shannon, peering out from beneath that hair and those sunglasses, eschews all the markers of the usual Elvis performance. The accent, for instance, is his own. Instead, he offers an understated portrait of a public figure who, for all the karate and the stir he creates, feels like a UFO; serenely touches down where he pleases, seemingly oblivious to the world freaking out around him. It’s something of a departure for the famously intense Shannon — not least in being genuinely quite amusing. Aside from a brief inaudible scene involving an open-top car, two pretty girls, and CCR’s Susie Q, we never even hear him sing.<i> Elvis & Nixon</i>’s soundtrack notably features no Elvis — it would certainly make for a misleading addition to any CD collection. </div>
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<span class="s1">Similarly, excluding one snippet of a phone conversation with Henry Kissinger, the film offers us nothing of Nixon’s politics. Spacey’s performance may be the more typical of the two — there’s the apelike hunch, the prickly demeanour, that oh-so imitable voice — but, even as a known mimic, there’s no sense of impersonation. Shannon and Spacey bring a subtlety to their respective roles that pays off particularly in the interplay between a legend and a president; Elvis obliviously breaking protocol, Nixon grudgingly coming to respect this kooky interloper. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">Any such meeting certainly lends itself to comedy of the zaniest sort — Elvis believes his years of costume and makeup have made him a master of disguise — but it’s acutely observed enough that it never feels like its going for easy laughs. <i>Elvis & Nixon</i>’s script, written by Joey Sagal, Hanala Sagal, and Cary Elwes, may feel like a TV movie </span>— a form in which the premise has already been offered — and offers a few stagey moments of self-reflection on Elvis’ part. Even so, the film, if not quite kingly, certainly won’t leave you feeling crook. A-thank you, thank you very much.</div>
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<span class="s1"><i>Elvis & Nixon </i>gets a 6.5 out of 10</span></h3>
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Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-38513264614851412452016-06-27T14:07:00.001-07:002016-06-27T14:07:35.810-07:00INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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They’ve back, just when we might have dared to hope that we were safe the next wave of big-budget blockbusters with meaningless subtitles sweeps into cinemas. Just as <i>Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice</i> failed to set the world alight by treating its material with undue reverence, <i>Independence Day: Resurgence </i>fails to set the world alight — while narratively doing exactly that — by treating its material with no reverence whatsoever. </div>
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<span class="s1">The film sets out to reprise more or less exactly what it did twenty years before with little of the novelty, a touch more irony, and nary a decent speech to be heard. While in 1996 the wholesale destruction of world monuments was considered worthy of “oohs” and “aahs” aplenty, nowadays it barely merits a “meh”. World-threatening peril, by forces alien, natural, or of our own devising — or, in the case of <i>X-Men: Apocalypse</i>, mutants — are more or less the spectacle du jour. As Jeff Goldblum’s wryly startled David Levinson notes amid plummeting skyscrapers and, one would assume, the attendant loss of human life, “They always go for the landmarks.” </span></div>
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<span class="s1">In all fairness, the dead do cast a large shadow over <i>Independence Day: Resurgence</i>; mostly in that the film’s younger generation (Liam Hemsworth’s cocky maverick, Jake; Jessie Usher’s too-earnest-to-be-quite-cool Dylan Hillier; Maika Monroe’s would-be Ripley, Patricia; ) can’t hold a candle to Will Smith’s cigar-chomping, alien-belting war hero from the first film. A lack of star power (or willingness to invest in it) doesn’t help counter the impression that this is primarily a cash grab. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">There’s a utterly subsidiary Chinese pilot, played by model-actress-singer Angelababy, who — despite serving as a would-be love interest for Travis Tope’s cheerfully dweeby Charlie — feels like a calculated play for a wider audience. Brent Spiner runs around dementedly in his undies with a matted white mane of hair and Bill Pullman salvages sound dignity as the shellshocked former Prez. The alien mothership may be substantially bigger, there are katana-wielding African warlords and magic spheres, but even the film’s high-tech lunar base feels like a case of <i>Ender’s</i> Again? For all of the heroic sacrifices none of them mean very much. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">This is <i>Independence Day:</i> <i>Regurgitated</i>*, a thin, warmed-over gruel that even the prospect of an intergalactic sequel can do little to infuse with any flavour.</span><br />
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<span class="s1">3.5 out of 10</span></h2>
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<span class="s1">* Thanks to Amarpal Biring for that one.</span></div>
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Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-61387720736941185442016-06-14T15:01:00.000-07:002016-06-14T15:01:00.315-07:00PICTUREHOUSE TRIPLE BILL<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="s1"><i><b>Adult Life Skills</b></i></span></h4>
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<i>Adult Life Skills </i>is one of those low-key, quirky dramedies that, if executed poorly, has the potential to be be near enough unwatchable. Fortunately, as executed by first-time writer-director Rachel Tunnard and her more than able cast, the film is instead a mopey, mirthful study of making magic out of mundanity. </div>
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Jodie Whittaker stars as Anna, a bereaved twin who spends her days doing admin at a small-town Yorkshire rowing club and her nights making videos with a tinfoil spaceship and her anthropomorphic thumbs. She sees faces in places — in egg cartons, in wood grain. She flirts awkwardly with soft-spoken, number-driven real estate agent Brendan (Brett Goldstein). She also lives in a shed, which her mum (Lorrain Ashborne) despairs about ever getting her out of. It’s only when Anna is forced to look after Clint (Ozzy Meyers), a scowl-y, cowboy-obsessed kid with troubles of his own. </div>
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Though perpetually verging on preciousness — Edward Hogg appears as a character credited as The Snorkeler — <i>Adult Life Skills</i> has enough insight into arrested development and grief to sidestep the trap of the twee.</div>
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<i>Tale of Tales</i> is <i>The Brothers Grimm</i> as Terry Gilliam should have made it. </div>
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Inspired by Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone — from which the film gets its name — and directed by Gomorrah’s Matteo Garone, it weaves together three archetypal fairytales: the jovial king (John C. Reilly) and bitter queen (Selma Hayek) longing for a child; one kindly yet capricious ruler (Toby Jones), his romantic daughter Violet (Bebe Cave), the flea and the ogre; and the two crones (Hayley Carmichael and Shirley Henderson) who inadvertently mislead a lusty prince (Vincent Cassel). Shot on location around Italy, sumptuously designed, and with a suitably fantastical score from Alexandre Desplat, <i>Tale of Tales </i>is baroque, bloody, alluring and repugnant. </div>
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The film might not have much by the way of substance, nor is Matteo the first filmmaker to turn his hand to fable — fellow Italian Pasolini did so with his Trilogy of Life back in the ‘70s — but when the scenery is this sumptuous and the monsters this grotesque, it’s hard to begrudge a little fancifulness.</div>
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<span class="s1">Like its predecessor, <i>Only God Forgives</i>, Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn’s latest, <i>The Neon Demon</i>, was also booed at Cannes. Unlike its predecessor, only the film’s final third might merit such a reaction. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">The film starts as a glossy, lurid scrutiny of beauty and what it elicits. Elle Fanning embodies radiant ingenue Jesse whose arrival in Los Angeles stirs lust and possessiveness in the male fashion set — Alessandro Nivo as a verse-declaiming designer, Desmond Harrington as an intense, hollow-cheeked photographer — and jealousy amid a kind-to-be-cruel clique of models — including Bella Heathcote, Abbey Lee, and neighbourly but unreadable makeup artist Ruby (Jena Malone). The film deftly plumbs these thematic depths with both clarity and unpredictability, which gives way to shock value and detached symbolism. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">An<i> <a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/skin/" target="_blank">Under the Skin </a></i><a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/skin/" target="_blank">about the skin itself</a>, Cronenberg’s<i> Crash </i>where the paraphilia is flesh instead of steel. There’s more to <i>The Neon Demon</i> than meets the eye till, all of a sudden, there isn’t.</span></div>
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Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-60477790517348049772016-05-29T16:12:00.000-07:002016-05-29T16:33:19.515-07:00MONEY MONSTER<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="s1">Jodie Foster’s most recent directorial effort after 2011’s <i>The Beaver,</i> <i>Money Monster </i>seeks to combine the hostage dynamics of <i>Dog Day Afternoon</i> with the financial acumen of <i>The Big Short</i>, but lacks the portfolio to pull it off. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">George Clooney stars as Lee Gates, a smirking Wall Street whiz who makes a living giving out overblown stock tips on a bells-and-whistles cable show called Money Monster. His brash exhortations comes back to bite — or possibly shoot him — however, when an angry investor, Kyle (Jack O’Connell), turns up in the studio with a gun, a bomb, and a dead man’s switch, demanding answers. What really happened at IBIS Global Capital that wiped $800 million off the stock price? And where is the company’s smug CEO Walt Camby (Dominic West)? </span></div>
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<span class="s1">As IBIS’ conflicted PR officer, Diane Lester (Catriona Balfe), struggles with her conscience, Gates lends the inarticulate Kyle his voice; first unwillingly then, increasingly, as benefactor/accomplice. Meanwhile, up in the control booth, Gates’ deeply committed director, Patty (Julia Roberts), keeps the show running — even relaying the occasional shot choice to long-suffering cameraman Lenny (Lenny Venito) down on the floor. </span></div>
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<span class="s1"><i>Money Monster</i>’s most pressing dramatic issue is its lack of urgency. Kyle is more upset than unstable; even after a vicious bollocking from his pregnant GF, there’s no sense he might doing anything truly desperate. Meanwhile, he gaggle of cops out in the street, as played by beloved character actors — Giancarlo Esposito (Gus from <i>Breaking Bad</i>), Chris Bauer (the Sheriff from <i>True Blood</i>), and John Ventimigli (Tony’s chef mate from <i>The Sopranos</i>) — feel like such a side-show that they might as well be starring in a TV spin-off of <i>Inside Man</i>.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">O’Connell rages, Clooney alternately cowers and crusades — and, of course, manages to be utterly charming while doing it — and Roberts holds it together, but the film itself is neither idea-driven or genre-focused enough to do very much more than exist.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">By making the cause of Kyle’s plight fraud — the obvious dramatic choice — rather than say greed, stupidity, and lack of foresight on a grand scale, such as was arguably the actual cause of the recent recession, the film’s script takes the bite out of what could be excoriating <i>Nightcrawler</i>-like satire. Characters talk about quantitative analytics, about money as energy, about being intellectually in love with a stock, but this all feels like lip service in the context of a film that ends with a literal march on Wall Street (with Gates aiding and abetting).</span></div>
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<i>Money Monster</i> is daft, rabble-rousing liberalism targeted at everyone and anyone who might be pissed off with the state of the economy. With little sapient to say on the matter, though, the film is forced to conclude that things might sorta be okay if only the fat cats could be made to admit that the ruthless pursuit of money above all else is wrong. As messages go, it doesn't add up to much.<br />
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<b>VERDICT: Huge dividends, dramatic or otherwise, are unlikely, but <i>Money Monster </i>might still be worth your time, if only as an eventual investment on VOD. </b><b>5 out of 10</b></h3>
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Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-72984461916871415662016-05-24T13:57:00.003-07:002016-05-24T13:57:36.249-07:00THE NICE GUYS<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="s1"><i>The Nice Guys</i> is your standard Shane Black neo-noir buddy comedy with a '70s retrofit but that's no bad thing. The film is a wild and seedy ride from the top of the derelict Hollywood sign, through — occasionally literally — the deluxe shag pads of Beverly Hills, and all the way down through the mean streets of L.A. The buddies in question are not mean per se, though they are respectively afraid and tarnished. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">Ryan Gosling plays shrill, ineffectual P.I. Holland March who drinks like a fish — if the fish in question were a just-about-functioning alcoholic — and whose most notable trait is a Looney Tunes-like ability to bounce back from a beating (or a fall or a self-inflicted severed artery after trying to punch in a window). Even his precocious daughter Holly is exasperated: "You're the world’s worst detective". He’s the opposite of your classic hard-bitten P.I. Bogart would have eaten him for lunch. Even Elliott Gould's stumblebum Phillip Marlowe might have been tempted to give him a slap. </span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
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<span class="s1">The hardbitten-ness comes vis-a-vis Jackson Healy, played by Russell Crowe, a wry, stocky bully-for-hire who ekes out a living delivering warnings to deadbeats, stalkers, and, on this occasion, Holland March. The warning Healy delivers to March — complete with a helpfully pre-diagnosed spiral fracture — comes courtesy of Amelia Kutner (Margaret Qualley), an insufferable rich kid environmentalist whose sudden disappearance seems to be connected to the recent death of a porn star and the Detroit automotive industry.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><br /></span>
<span class="s1">More than just the eminently quotable one-liners we’ve come to expect from any Shane Black joint — “I had to question the mermaids!” — <i>The Nice Guys</i> also features some impeccably orchestrated physical comedy. There’s a bit of a slapstick involving a gun, a cigarette, and a toilet stall door that’s up there with Abbott & Costello. The plot is more than vaguely similar to Black’s directorial debut <i>Kiss Kiss Bang Bang</i>: egregiously bad parenting and porn-related hijinks are a recurring theme, as well as the obligatory ill-timed discovery/disposal of a corpse. </span><br />
<span class="s1"><br /></span>
<span class="s1">This only matters, though, in the way that plot mattered in Robert Altman’s <i>The Long Goodbye</i> — a clear influence here — or P.T. Anderson's<i> Inherent Vice</i>; in that it more or less just provides opportunity for various thrills and spills. </span>This orchestrated chaos happens to feature a henchmen who bares an uncanny resemblance to Sacha Baron Cohen, another who’s a dapper psycho (played by Matt Bomer no less) named for one of <i>The Waltons</i>; a Pam Griers-alike, Tally (Yaya DaCosta); a putty-mouthed Kim Basinger (reunited with Crowe, her <i>L.A. Confidential </i>costar); a giant talking bee; and Richard Nixon.</div>
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<span class="s1"></span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><i>The Nice Guys </i>is darkly comic, hilariously bloody noir in which bystanders take stray bullets and every neighbourhood kid’s a potential grifter. Cynical yet strangely good-natured, the film even has something vaguely resembling character arcs for both its leads. Unpredictable and scattershot, it certainly solves the case of what you should go see in the cinema come June 3rd.</span></div>
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<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<span class="s1"><i>The Nice Guys </i>gets an 8 out of 10</span></h3>
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Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-38156450199322632132016-04-12T07:50:00.001-07:002016-04-12T16:08:48.609-07:00KNIGHT OF CUPS<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">After
deciding not to commit any more time or words, written <a href="http://ofallthefilmblogs.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/batman-v-superman-dawn-of-justice.html" target="_blank">or otherwise</a>, to analysing
and dissecting <i>Batman V Superman</i>, I find comparisons to Zack Snyder’s crap-ton opus
cropping up in the most unlikely of places – namely the work of a (once)
genuinely visionary director. </span></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";"><i>Knight
of Cups</i> is a film you could drown in – a vast thematic ocean lapping against the distant shore of some grand, obscure vision; and apparently I don’t have any swimming
trunks. As a director-philosopher (or should that be philosopher-director?),
Terrence Malick has always experimented with the medium, but his latest work
seems to mark the crossing of a conceptual Rubicon. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">Where 2011’s <i>Tree of Life</i> –
a genuine masterpiece – encapsulated the brevity and preciousness of human
experience by juxtaposing the private grief of an All-American family in ‘50s
Texas with the origins of the universe (over almost two and a half hours no
less), <i>Knight of Cups</i> eschews such contrivances as plot and character almost
entirely.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">Following
an itinerant screenwriter, Rick (Christian Bale), around Los Angeles and its surrounding
environs, the film is directly engaged in a search for meaning and so diligently
wades through meaninglessness. Malick’s camera drifts close behind the silently
watchful Rick as he makes his way through lavish parties, down skid row, across
desert flats, even via the Paramount backlot; switching occasionally to Rick’s
POV as if to say, “This is you, you wanderer, you pilgrim.” </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">Even an earthquake
and a minor home invasion can’t shake our nomadic protagonist out of his
reverie – or, Heaven forbid, prompt him to pick up a pen. Rick isn’t so much
character as camera; the frame through which Malick unfurls this gauzy
tapestry.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">Less
cinema than poetry told through images, <i>Knight of Cups</i> is replete with literary
quotations – from The Pilgrim's Progress, from the apocryphal Hymn of the Pearl
– but there is nothing at the centre of Malick's quest; no pearl, no progress, no
common nucleus of human experience. There’s experience aplenty – kissing,
running into the sea fully clothed, luminous body paint – Spring Break as high
art – but no more significance to any of it than a handful of holiday snapshots. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">Repetition should lend meaning – a man cycling along a boulevard (different
man, different boulevard) – but these
images provide no key in or out. The film’s ending, when it comes, arrives
abruptly and without apparent foreshadowing.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">Characters
pass like ships in the light – Cate Blanchett as Rick’s physician ex-wife;
Teresa Palmer as the “High Priestess” stripper; Rick’s bullish father (Brian
Dennehy) and volatile brother (Wes Bentley).1 It’s clear by the level of talent
– no fewer than four Oscar winners are involved onscreen and off – that Malick’s
vision is alluring. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">Natalie Portman, who plays ‘Death’ AKA Elizabeth2 and
attended Malick’s alma mater, Harvard, must have seen something in the
fragmentary pages of script that, to my eye, certainly doesn’t survive . You’d
never know of Malick’s practice of “torpedoing” — unexpectedly throwing cast
members into scenes to force improvisation — because no real conflict reaches
the surface.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";"><i>Knight
of Cups </i>could play on a loop at a modern art installation without much loss.3 The
patrons could pause momentarily to glean what they can from Emmanuel Lubezki’s radiant
cinematography – bright, pale, and naturally lit, of course4 – or one of
Malick’s cryptic snatches of voiceover – the rows of palm trees that line the
L.A boulevards tell us, for instance, that anything’s possible – before simply
moving on.5 </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">This is perhaps the only film that I wish they’d provided
SparkNotes for going in; a handy how-to guide of reference points and symbolism.
After almost two hours I almost, perversely, wished it would go on longer, just
in the hope that it might all come together in one revelatory burst - alas.</span></span></div>
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</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">In
his <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/terrence-malicks-knight-of-cups-challenges-hollywood-to-do-better" target="_blank">review for <i>The New York Time</i>s</a>, Richard Brody described <i>Knight of Cups</i> in
terms of “the confessional, the inside-Hollywood story, the Dantesque
midlife-crisis drama, the religious quest, the romantic struggle, the sexual
reverie, the family melodrama” – but, while all of these undercurrents are
undoubtedly present, none of them have any hold. </span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">The film is all in the
motion, like the breaking of waves; the journey rather than any single arrival or conversation. In this it
resembles a 118-minute version of Sean Penn’s present-day perambulations in
T<i>ree of Life</i> – reverently wandering between skyscrapers and riding in lifts as
though travel were somehow the essence of meaning instead of a necessary
transition between point A and point B.6 </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">The film has so little actual
structure to it, regardless of what the chapter headings proclaim, that just
finding a rhythm to this review has, perhaps obviously, been challenging.7</span></span></div>
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</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">Dealing
with recurring themes in Malick’s work, like the death of a brother, this feels
less like cinema than indulgence, therapy even, that, like Woody Allen and his
recent travelogues – which are at least entertaining – is difficult to dismiss
as navel-gazing simply because the navel in question is so remarkably well
composed. Those few impressions that linger – the jaws of a dog, plunging
futilely into a pool to recover a lost toy – endure only as curios; detached,
adrift from that work that should encompass them. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">Perversely,
the film <i>Knight of Cups</i> most reminds me of is<i> Batman V Superman </i>- which,
despite its subtitle, did justice to nothing and no one.8 Where that was too narrative-driven,
this is slight; where that was too dark, all matte and gloss, this is light;
where that was categorically shit, this is, well… wank. At least the
former has the decency to be bad; this is just ephemeral.9 What films like <i>BVS
</i>and <i>KoC</i>10 do, though, is make you appreciate tightly structured, disciplined
cinema.11 </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";"><i>Knight of Cups </i>is a film for which I've seen more than one positive
review use words like "indecipherable" and "imponderable".
Now, I can handle a certain amount of poetic obscurity,12 but, forgive me for
being old-fashioned, I like my films to make sense. </span></span></div>
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</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">One of Rick's myriad lovers – possibly Imogen Poots13 – informs him, "You're not looking for love. You're looking for a love
experience." <i>Knight of Cups</i> is not a film but a cinematic experience; one
that'll either sweep you away or leave you marooned, as it did me. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">The only
reason I can't dismiss it out of hand is the lingering sense that maybe I
missed something, that I was looking too closely (or else not closely enough)
and the film's self-evident transcendence somehow got slipped between my
bifocals. What was for me a tedious experience might well prove a transcendent one
for you. Try as I did to engage, my latch was clearly broken.</span><b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";"> </span></b></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">Ponderous
and imponderable, and, like its protagonist, easily led, <i>Knight of Cups</i> gets a
4.0 out of 10</span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">1
Jason Clarke appears silently in one scene, presumably a victim of Malick’s
legendary editing process. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">2
<i>Knight of Cups</i> is divided into eight chapter, all named, as the film itself is,
for tarot cards. After ‘Death’, fortunately, comes ‘Freedom’ – were it ‘Rebirth’
I might have been obliged to sit through the whole thing again.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">3
The film is a canvas onto which you are almost obliged to project your own
feelings, your own interpretations. Unfortunately I’ve never had the opportunity
to bum around the L.A. party scene with a bevy of beauties on my arm and a
seemingly inexhaustible wallet; otherwise I may have found Rick’s evident
satisfaction with his lot in life a bit more relatable.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">4
What is it with Lubezki and films I don’t quite get on with (even if they are
Best Picture winners)? <a href="http://ofallthefilmblogs.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/gravity.html" target="_blank">I liked </a><i><a href="http://ofallthefilmblogs.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/gravity.html" target="_blank">Gravity</a> </i>but didn’t <span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">adore it</span> as much as
<a href="http://ofallthefilmblogs.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/american-hustle.html" target="_blank"><i>American Hustle</i></a>; <i>Birdman </i>was fun and superficially profound, but I <span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">didn't even <span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">end up reviewing it</span></span>. As for <a href="http://ofallthefilmblogs.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/the-revenant_23.html" target="_blank"><i>The Revenant</i>…</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">5
Hanan Townshend's ethereal string score is certainly relentlessly buoying.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">6
You can count the moments of actual “drama” in <i>Knight of Cups</i> on the fingers of
one fist. At one point I think Wes Bentley actually throws something. It very
nearly startled me awake. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">7
Hence the footnotes you are currently
reading. The main body<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";"> i</span>s for you; these are more or less just to help me work
through any extraneous thoughts.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">8
And that’s my last word on it – I promise.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">9
Tightly wound films like, say <a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-whiplash" target="_blank"><i>Whiplash</i></a>,
which I haven’t seen since October 2014 and loved so much on girst viewing that
I’m afraid to open my BluRay copy in case it somehow tarnishes the memory.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">10
Malick’s next film, shot back to back with <i>Knight of Cups</i>, is actually called <i>Weightless</i>, but it’s hard to imagine it can be less substantial than
this.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">11
Okay one more parting shot:<i> BVS</i> is very close to IBS and <i>K<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">o</span>C</i> is a similarly<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">inspired</span>
acronym.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">12
Carol Morley's <a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-falling/" target="_blank"><i>The Falling</i></a>
was one of my favourite<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">s of 2015</span>; a film no less ambitious in its own way for its commitment to actually
telling a story. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">13
It is actually Imogen Poots. She’s called Della in the film – at least that’s what
Wikipedia tells me – but for all intents and purposes she’s Imogen Poots. Antonio
Banderas is charming and dances. Blanchet brings both fragility and strength in
a minor role whose character motivations are provided explicitly via voiceover.
Bale just looks about fixedly, occasionally giving a dopy grin or knowing smirk. “Hollow”
characters can be fascinating – just see <i>Nightcrawler</i> or Bale himself in
<i>American Psycho</i> – but there’s not even any pretence here.</span></span></div>
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Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-72358744887957671862016-04-08T08:46:00.000-07:002016-04-12T09:15:02.326-07:00EYE IN THE SKY<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
<i>Eye in the Sky</i> is the type of film that lends itself to descriptors
like “timely” and “prescient”. It may not be the first drama to tackle the
spectre of drone warfare – Ethan Hawke-starrer<i> A Good Kill</i> did so through the
lens of a character study – but it is certainly has the weightiest cast.
<br />
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The eye in question is a MQ-9 Reaper, a US-manned drone
equipped with two Hellfire missiles currently positioned 20,000 feet over a
terrorist safe-house in Nairobi, Kenya. Commanding the operation is the steely Colonel
Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) – not from the stark, sunny Nevada air-force
base where her USAF pilot Steve Watts (Aaron Paul) is stationed, but from a bunker
in early-morning Sussex; around which a whole network of checks and oversights
is based. </div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
Powell has been tracking a terrorist couple for six years –
one a white British woman and clear analogue for the real-life Samantha
Lewthwaite AKA the White Widow – and now, with her sights on them, is
determined to bring them in. However, the mission changes when a bug operated
by an undercover agent on the ground, Jama Farad (Barkhad Abdi), reveals
preparations are underway for a suicide bombing that will most likely claim dozens
of lives should they be permitted to leave the compound.</div>
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When the mission objective leaps from “capture” to “terminate" (or rather "prosecute"),
Powell and the whole staff discover an added moral component: the presence of a
young bread-selling girl, Alia (Aisha Takow), on the street outside the
compound; introducing the probability of collateral damage. As politicians
overseen by a Lieutenant General Benson (Alan Rickman) argue over the legality
of a unilateral strike and look to cover their backs politically, all involved find
themselves faced with an impossible decision. </div>
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Unlike Hood’s 2007 film <i>Rendition</i> – which dealt (understandably)
one-sidedly with the issue of “extraordinary rendition” – <i>Eye in the Sky</i>
approaches the situation from every angle. Powell is determined to prevent an
attack, even if it means manipulating the odds. Watts and his colleague Carrie
Gershon (Phoebe Fox) are hoping to avoid pulling the trigger on an innocent. Jama
is committed to saving the young girl’s life, despite the immediate risk posed to
his own by the militant extremists who run the community.</div>
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<br />
While playing out essentially in real-time in a series of interlinking
rooms – and, of course, that one street in Nairobi – Guy Hibbert’s script makes
the most of the discursive material; specifically in the contrasting approaches
to the dilemma. The US Secretary of State (Michael O’Keefe) barely steps away
from a game of ping pong to brusquely give his assent; his British counterpart,
the green-around-the-gills Foreign Secretary (Iain Glenn) faces the crisis from
atop his porcelain throne.</div>
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Hood’s direction is pacey and assured, deftly handling the
different narrative strands and steadily building up the suspense as decision
time approaches. Even so, <i>Eye in the Sky </i>does stumble; slipping into superfluous
sentimentality in scenes of the Alia joyfully hula hooping or learning maths
from her enlightened father, Musa (Arman Haggio). Paul Hepker and Mark Kilian’s
swelling Middle Eastern score similarly telegraphs emotion where Watts’ teary
desperation says enough.</div>
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Aaron Paul’s strength as a performer lies in is his ability
to wordlessly convey internal conflict – he always looks like a war is raging
within his skull – and, by confining him to, essentially, a state-of-the-art
Portacabin, the film plays to this strength. Forced to watch and wait as a
decision is made by commanders and politicians a world away, the film captures,
if only in brief, the trauma of those whose only recourse is to carry out those
orders when they come – whatever they might be.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
Director Gavin Hood’s first film since 2013’s <i>Ender’s Game</i>, <i>Eye
in the Sky</i> also marks the welcome return of Barkhad Abdi to our screens for the
first time since his Oscar-nominated debut in <i>Captain Phillips</i>. It also
signifies the last time that Alan Rickman will grace us with his presence.<br />
<br />
Though
best recognised for the lightly sardonic air he brought to all his roles – the sense
of an eyebrow perpetually raised – Rickman also brought an undeniable bedrock of sincerity. Whether struggling to purchase a doll for his daughter (who
one assumes must be roughly the same age as Alia) or succinctly issuing a
rebuttal to Monica Dolan’s self-righteous civil servant – “Never tell a soldier
that he does not know the cost of war” – Rickman is a master of reserve. More than just the sneer and the drawl
popularized by his omnivorous turn in <i>Prince of Thieves</i>, <i>Eye in the
Sky</i> is a stark reminder of the talent we’ve lost with his passing.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It may offer no real opinion on the War on Terror itself, but <i>Eye
in the Sky </i>is a well-observed (excuse the pun), intellectually rigorous look at
a necessary evil of the modern age – somewhat compromised by its play for
mainstream appeal. Call it "An Alright Kill".</div>
<h3 class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<i> </i></h3>
<h3 class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<i>Eye in the Sky </i>gets a 7 out of 10</h3>
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Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-25753816304730823272016-04-02T12:43:00.000-07:002016-04-07T13:14:56.239-07:00MIDNIGHT SPECIAL<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="s1">The fourth film of 37-year-old Arkansan director Jeff Nichols, <i>Midnight Special </i>feels like a narrative made to fit its title. Named for an old folk standard, it follows Roy (Michael Shannon), and his son, Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), a goggle-wearing pre-teen gifted with supernatural abilities. As the three, including driver Lucas (Joel Edgerton), speed through Texas, heading for an unknown destination, both the Federal government — embodied by Adam Driver’s geeky NSA specialist, Paul Sevier — and a Midwestern cult — led by a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him Sam Shephard — are in pursuit. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">The question of whether Alton is saviour or threat is ultimately irrelevant, though: new father Nichols’ interest lies, understandably, in father-son relationship, as seen through a distinctly Spielbergian lens. As Edgerton’s worn but well-meaning accomplice remarks they — along with Alton’s mother, Sarah (Kirsten Dunst) — “would have made a nice family”. David Wingo’s low, driving electronic score and Adam Stone’s sharp night-time cinematography evoke a variety of ‘80s sci-fi classics — as does a scene where Sarah’s mother is menacingly doorstepped by two cult members looking for “Sarah” — but Nichols’ exposition-free script focuses on character.</span></div>
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The exact nature of Alton’s abilities — his eyes glow with white light, he picks up encrypted government signals and brings down a satellite in a rain of fiery debris — and disabilities is left unclear — each episode leaves him physically weaker and, for reasons never explained, can only travel at night (hence, one presumes) the title. As with Nichols’ previous works, <i>Midnight Special</i> is all about how far we are willing to go to protect our family — albeit with a slightly different milieu from the working-class desperation that characterised his debut feature, <i>Shotgun Stories</i>. </div>
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<span class="s1">Shannon’s more reserved role doesn’t necessarily play to the actor’s full range — this is arguably the least remarkable of his and Nichols’ four collaborations; the most being his turn as the doomsaying family man of <i>Give Me Shelter</i> — but the buttoned-down intensity he brings to the role is faintly compelling. Lieberher’s Alton is, refreshingly, just an ordinary, slightly solemn kid (as opposed to, say, the kid from <i>Mercury Rising</i>) </span>— albeit one given to mysterious proclamations — and Dunst breathes life and nuance into an otherwise slightly thankless role. </div>
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Despite some inconsistent mythology and a finale that takes the notion of “a better world for our children” way too literally (think <i>Tomorrowland</i> meets <i>A.I.</i>), <i>Midnight Special</i> is, for the most part, a well-observed, no-frills genre/chase flick. Along with <i>10 Cloverfield Lane</i>, the film makes the case that the mid-budget genre flick is alive and well and, it seems, living south of the Mason-Dixon.</div>
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<span class="s1"><i>Midnight Special</i> gets a 6.5 out of 10</span></h3>
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Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-39397790425662953542016-03-30T05:36:00.003-07:002016-04-11T06:33:56.206-07:00THE WITCH<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b>SPOILERS</b></div>
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Is there a more potent symbol in American mythology than
that of the witch? Though an export of the old world, the witch is also a symbol
of modernity – a frightening sort of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>progressiveness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For potions and spells read medicine and
psychology; healing and hysteria. In Robert Eggers’ <i>The Witch</i>, however, they are also
the baby-killing devil worshippers of lore, but, in the context of the 17th Century
wilderness the film conjures up, even this is almost condonable. </div>
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The initial folly here lies with William (Ralph Ineson), a
fervent Puritan whose “prideful conceit” leads to him and his family being
banished from a New England plantation. Having already travelled across the sea,
William, his pregnant wife Katherine (Kate Dickie), eldest son Caleb (Harvey
Scrimshaw), daughter Thomasin (the first credited film role of Anya
Taylor-Joy), and inherently creepy fraternal twins Jonas and Mercy journey out
into the countryside to eke out of a living off the land.<br />
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Instead of purity,
however, they find only hardship – crops die, animals escape traps – and misery
to test even the hardiest of faith. If mankind is born into sin as William, not
unkindly, contends then amid the foreboding placidity of black spindly trees,
away from civilization, they takes salvation or damnation in their own hands.<br />
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<i>The Witch </i>eschews simple scares in favour of disquietment and a genuine sense of spiritual dread;
Jarin Blaschke’s stark, all-natural lighting and Mark Korven’s score –
unsettling ambience rising suddenly into a howling chorus – effectively see to
that. Subtitled ‘A New England Folk Tale’, the film shows what happens when
ordinary, decent people go up against the implacable forces of darkness.<br />
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In the
face of evil a father’s weakness in telling his wife a hard truth, a son’s
awakening sexuality, their mother’s grief-stricken piety, a daughter’s rashness
of speech – all spell doom. The film isn’t simply an eerie meditation on man’s
uncertain place in the universe. There’s also a yellow-eyed, twitchy-nosed
rabbit that makes the one in <i>Monty Python and The Holy Grail </i>look like a
timorous wee beastie and the film as a whole beats out <i>The Revenant</i> in the “Fuck
Nature” stakes.<br />
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Ineson is a gruff, compelling presence while Dickie presents
the acute image of a woman desperately longing to return to her former nature
and relative state of grace (even if, alongside <i>Game of Thrones</i>, there’s a
recurring motif of deeply ill-advised breast feeding.) While Scrimshaw’s Caleb is an
innocent led astray, its Thomasin’s pale, unspoken – likely unrealised – anger that, more than red-lipped temptresses or Goya-esque <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>crones, gets at the film’s dark, corruptible
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If a new-born baby has no guarantee of entry into Heaven, how – and why –
should man – or woman – withstand corruption? The plantation, with its almost
comical clusters of blank-faced, identically dressed Puritans staring in
judgment, may offer safety and security, but there is no hope of liberation
within its walls or dogma.</div>
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Though it’s unlikely to win any modern-day converts to the Satanic
Temple (though the group has since endorsed the film), <i>The Witch</i> stands alongside
the likes of Ben Wheatley’s <i>A Field in England</i> - if only for the language and setting - and Ingmar Bergman’s<i> Cries and
Whispers</i> as an eerie study of human suffering and the absence of God. Stalking
the periphery of the horror genre, the film is a theologic nightmare that will
get under your skin and, just possibly, that bit deeper.<br />
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<b><i>The Witch</i> gets an 8.5 out of 10</b></h3>
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Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-6592533064765704312016-03-29T06:12:00.000-07:002016-03-29T06:12:32.350-07:00BATMAN V. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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With my written review having devolved into a more or less unprintable rant, here are my thoughts in spoken form instead; courtesy of Mr. Rob Daniel and the <a href="http://www.electric-shadows.com/" target="_blank">Electric Shadows</a> podcast, of which I am lucky enough to be the co-host.<br />
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All and any feedback is kindly appreciated. <br />
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Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-28632722402581593342016-03-22T15:24:00.000-07:002016-03-23T07:58:36.615-07:0010 CLOVERFIELD LANE<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="s1">One woman, two men, and an underground bunker. </span><br />
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<span class="s1">As its residential title might suggest, <i>10 Cloverfield Lane</i> is a far more localized affair than its so-called spiritual predecessor, found-footage monster flick <i>Cloverfield</i>. Both the output of J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot production company, and released under similarly mysterious circumstances, those looking for large-scale destruction here will likely leave disappointed. What unfolds instead is a tightly-wound tale of precarious coexistence in the wake of likely apocalypse.</span><br />
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<span class="s1">Fleeing her home in New Orleans after a fight with her fiancée, Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is involved in a car wreck and wakes up in an underground bunker. Her captor/host Howard (John Goodman) tells her that an unknown doomsday event has occurred, leaving the surface of the Earth contaminated. After some early well-founded scepticism, Michelle comes to reluctantly accept Howard’s claim and, along with rustic interloper Emmett (an endearing John Gallagher, Jr.), sets about trying to make the best of an impossible situation.</span><br />
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<span class="s1">However, their attempt to form a nuclear family quickly turns toxic due to Howard’s volatility </span>— and some serious worrying issues with women. There are moments of calm amid the communal storminess — of magazine reading, film watching (Howard has managed to preserve a collection of DVDs and VHS that would most likely appall the AFI), and heartfelt conversations about past regrets — but when every dinner table conversation or game of Charades is a minefield it’s obvious that this arrangement can’t endure for long.<br />
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<span class="s1">Originally an original script called The Cellar, <i>10 Cloverfield Lane</i>'s only real connection to its predecessor is the idea of monsters — which, to quote the tagline, "Come In Many Forms". A far cry from the more ebullient menace he brought to films like <i>Barton Fink</i>, Goodman imbues Howard with a simmering narcissism. Even when he’s bumping along in front of the jukebox or recalling his absent daughter, there’s the sense that his resentfulness could surge into sudden violence. As far as chemistry goes, this is one brew that would choke Walter White.</span><br />
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<span class="s1">Though it veers into outright genre in its denouement (by way of Chekov's whiskey bottle), before it turns her into Ellen Ripley the film makes Michelle into a protagonist who is both flawed resourceful. For a film with almost no expectations attached — its existence was a closely guarded secret before January </span>— this is one cinematic address well worth the visiting.<br />
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<span class="s1"><b>VERDICT: This may not be Abrams' first rodeo when it comes to bunkers - there's even a hatch! - but <i>10 Cloverfield Lane </i>is equals parts <i>LOST </i>and <i>Room</i>, albeit with an intriguing sci-fi slant. First-time director Dan Trachtenberg's direction is slick but not showy (just check out the 360 pan when the camera first enters the homey main living area) and the film's script (rewritten by <i>Whiplash</i>'s Damien Chazelle) is a tightly-wound triumph.</b></span><br />
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<b><i>10 Cloverfield Lane </i>gets an 8.5 out of 10</b></h3>
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Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-41684316847873488692016-03-07T16:36:00.000-08:002016-04-11T06:34:15.432-07:00HAIL, CAESAR!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="s1">Everyone loves a good movie about the movies. Hollywood’s fetish for self-mythologizing1 lends itself to tales of stardom2 and scathing satire3 alike, but few films imbue Tinseltown with the same glow or seeming reverence as the Coen Brothers’ latest. </span></div>
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<span class="s1"><i>Hail, Caesar! </i>takes the real-life persona of Eddie Mannix (played here in highly fictionalised form by Josh Brolin)4, the archetypal studio “fixer”, and transforms him into a Christlike figure. When hapless matinee idol Baird Whitlock (George Clooney5) is snatched from the set of a sword-and-sandals Biblical epic — also titled <i>Hail, Caesar!</i>6 — it falls to Mannix to secure his return. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">This involves negotiating with his mysterious kidnappers7, a group who call themselves The Future; all while handling the (mis)casting of singing cowboy Hobie Doyle8 (Alden Ehrenreich), the pregnancy of an Esther Williams-like aqua-musical star (Scarlett Johansson)9, and being hounded by twin gossip columnists (both Tilda Swinton). </span></div>
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<span class="s1">Segueing through various period appropriate period pieces — including a perma-tanned Channing Tatum in a homo-erotically charged <i>Anchors Aweigh </i>pastiche10 — the film is comprised of a few witty cameos11 and some good ideas12, but its all subtext, no stakes.13 </span></div>
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<span class="s1">Hardly the conquering hero, <i>Hail, Caesar! </i>is at best a knockabout second-rater amid the Coen canon. A <i>Burn After Reading</i> without the bite, <i>Intolerable Cruelty </i>without the cruelty, in looking at the stars, the film strays too far from the gutter, losing sight of the salaciousness that might have made this a memorable affair instead of just another trip to the movies.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><i>Hail, Caesar!</i> gets 6 out of 10</b></span></h3>
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<span class="s1">1 It can only be so long before we get a biopic of James Cagney that features an actor playing Cagney playing, say, Lon Chaney (as Cagney did in 195’s <i>Man of a Thousand Faces</i>), who is himself playing a character. levels performance balance</span></div>
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<span class="s1">2 E.g. <i>The Player</i>.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">3 E.g. <i>A Star Is Born</i>.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">4 The real Mannix was an executive at MGM who had no kids and at least one longterm affair. He was also implicated in the apparent suicide of George Reeves, TV’s original Superman, as dramatised in the film Hollywoodland. In short, not the sort of guy likely to worry unduly about the cost to his immortal soul of sneaking a few cigarettes.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">5 A worthy addition to Clooney’s roster of numbskulls, Whitlock is a goggle-eyed sap, an empty vessel ready to be filled with words and ideals, like the florid oratory of a Roman officer who undergoes a religious conversion when faced by Christ the godhead (who, incidentally, does not appear in this film).</span></div>
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<span class="s1">6 Albeit with the added subtitle “A Tale of the Christ” — the film, after all, owes a debt to Ben-Hur.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">7 The words of a Roman officer, or those of a “study group” of Communist screenwriters with a passion for Heidegger and lack of appreciation for irony.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">8 A charming, slightly bumptious fellow who’s utterly loyal to the studio and good with a lasso. But not quite a home in <i>Merrily We Dance</i>, a cool, sophisticated prestige pic directed by Ralph Fiennes’ Laurence Lorenz, an impeccably mannered Vincente Minelli stand-in whose controlled, self-effacing frustration is a wonder to behold.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">9 Introduced to us a manically smiling mermaid in an elaborate synchronised swimming sequence, she’s revealed to be a brusque Brooklyn gal: “How am I? Wet,”</span></div>
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<span class="s1">10 Just call him Gene Commie.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">11 Including Jonah Hill as the world’s most reliable surety agent (he’s bonded) and Dolph Lundgren in silhouette.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">12 Mostly along the lines of how the division of God mirrors the division of labour, which plays into the surprisingly conservative notion of, essentially, “knowing your place”. They do give the rabbi a few good lines, though: “You worship a God who doesn't love anyone.” “Not true. he loves Jews.”</span></div>
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<span class="s1">13 Excluding a nasty bit of business involving Frances McDormand’s hyper-efficient, chain-smoking editor and a projector — perhaps the film’s only true striking moment — there’s nothing harsher here than a few slaps. Even compared to <i>Inside Llewyn Davis</i>, which at least had some Greenwich Village pettiness and self-loathing, this is mild stuff.</span></div>
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Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-34367512086539521662016-02-14T04:29:00.003-08:002016-04-11T06:34:35.727-07:00DEADPOOL<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="s1">Okay, let’s do this. Hard-bitten cop “Dirty” Harry Callahan must save San Francisco from a killer who’s bumping off resident celebrities. No, wait, sorry: that’s <i><u>The</u> Dead Pool</i>. </span><i>Deadpool </i>is the latest addition to FOX’s Not-Quite Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s their <i>Guardians of the Galaxy</i> with the weirdness factor ramped up to eleven. </div>
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<span class="s1">The red-suited mutant wisecracker is a role for which star Ryan Reynolds has a definite affinity. Ever since <i>X-Men: Origins </i>gave him a platform then sewed up his mouth, Reynolds has been fighting for a standalone Deadpool movie. It’s to his credit that the once and former Green Lantern actor more than takes his in-movie licks for both mistakes of the past and his offscreen PEOPLE Magazine persona. <i>Deadpool</i>’s genre-skewing, emoticon-laden marketing may, perhaps, be more consistently inventive, but, working within the bounds of otherwise standard genre fare, the film manages to give the fourth wall a few good kicks.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Wade Wilson (Reynolds) is a mercenary with a smart mouth who’s clearly made some bad life choices. His luck changes, though, when he meets Vanessa (Morena Baccarrin), an equally quirky escort with whom he falls madly, if somewhat unconventionally, in love. After a year of holiday-themed debauchery, Wade is diagnosed with terminal cancer with only one hope of survival: to take part in an experimental program designed to create superheroes. </span><br />
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<span class="s1">Having been subjected to the tender mercies of the smirking Ajax AKA Francis (Ed Skrein — Jason Statham without the boisterous swagger), Wade finds himself with a new ability that makes him more or less indestructible, but with an unfortunate side effect that also makes him, in his own words, “completely unfuckable”. As such, the newly christened Deadpool heads out to track down Ajax and get his pretty boy face back. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">Freezing the action at inopportune moments to offer commentary, Deadpool himself straddles the line between endearing and annoying, just like his comic counterpart. Violent, silly, profane, and self-aware, the film feels very much like the talkative, ADHD younger cousin of the X-Men franchise; even to the extent that it includes two of Xavier’s team, moralising metal giant, Colossus (Stefan Kapičić), and the sullen, atomic-powered Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), trying to recruit Deadpool. </span><br />
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If you’re looking for the operatic, you’d be best to check out<i> Batman v. Superman</i>. If you’re looking for an all-star cast, <i>Captain America: Civil War</i> could be just the ticket. Still, if a deeply meta, crass yet sensitive romantic(ish)-comedy sounds like a your gore-filled, profanity-laden cup of tea, there’s nothing much else like it out there.1</div>
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<span class="s1"><b><i>Deadpool </i>gets 7 out of 10<span style="font-size: xx-small;">1</span></b></span></h3>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">1 </span>And a footnote free review, thank you very much, Ben and Rob. Oh wait, damn...</div>
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Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-86189310006957975902016-01-23T17:15:00.002-08:002016-04-12T07:49:58.895-07:00THE REVENANT<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Okay, so I have a problem with <i>The Revenant</i>. It’s not the same issue I had with <i>Argo </i>back in 2012 (a decent retro thriller, not a Best Picture) or even with <i>The Theory of Everything</i> or <i>American Sniper </i>last year (good performances, not much else — also by no means indispensable). The matter with Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s latest is, for me, is its lack of matter. </div>
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<span class="s1">Set amid the snowy Great Plains circa 1823, the film initially follows a party of fur trappers fleeing across the mountains in the wake of a bloody and chaotic massacre by Arikara warriors. When their guide, the guarded Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), is mauled by a grizzly, Captain Andrew Henry (Domnhall Gleeson) assigns two men – the self-interested John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) and a then greenhorn Jim Bridger (Will Poulter) – to stay and tend to him until he passes. </span><br />
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<span class="s1">Fitzgerald, however, is not about to risk his life for a dying man and decides to put Glass out of his misery. When Glass’ half-Pawnee son, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), tries to intervene, Fitzgerald kills him as Glass looks on, horrified and helpless. Half-buried and left for dead, Glass crawls out of his own grave and embarks on a trek across hostile, inhospitable territory to claim Fitzgerald’s life. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">The majority of critics seem to have been swept away by Iñárritu’s tale of vengeance and survival – it currently holds an 82% on Rotten Tomatoes and has been nominated for twelve Oscars – but I found myself strangely unmoved. <i> </i></span><br />
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<span class="s1"><i>The Revenant</i>’s shoot is already well on its way to becoming legend: shooting in sub-zero temperatures in twelve different locations, three different countries, with all natural light is certainly impressive, but it doesn’t in itself make for a better film. Van Gogh’s contribution to Post-Impressionism was not improved one iota by his having cut off his own era.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">DiCaprio doesn’t act so much as endure; endure greasy furs, freezing waters, and a diet that Bear Grylls would baulk at (still-steaming bison liver or frozen bone marrow, anyone?). If DiCaprio walks away with the Oscar this year, as seems to be the likely outcome, it will be an award won with graft - blood and spit, teeth gritted, eyes rolling - as opposed to craft. </span> If the best acting is reacting, what else can you do in the face of ordeals such as these? <span class="s1">The film's final shot of him, streamy-eyed and desperate, is the closest I've seen to an outright onscreen plea for acknowledgement. </span><br />
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Hardy, meanwhile, is in full-on gruff and stare-y mode as the semi-scalped Fitzgerald, but it's neither he nor the omnipresent Gleeson's best film this year. This isn’t even either's best Best Picture candidate.</div>
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<span class="s1">Based on a true story (though each of the words in that phrase are open to differing degrees of interpretation), Glass’ struggle against the forces of nature lends itself to spectacle — flaming arrows soaring overhead, a horse taking a tumble off a cliff — but <i>The Revenant </i>isn’t content to leave it there. With its repeated cutaways to bare pines and pale skies, it feels like the film is attempting to offer some obscure commentary about nature’s indifference to man, but the impassivity of wood and stone is less than entirely compelling. </span><br />
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<span class="s1">There’s an assumption of profundity – that some grand statement is being made about mankind’s place in the universe – but <i>The Revenant </i>is too caught up in its survivalist trappings (pun semi-intended) to commit to making a definite statement.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The film avoids the cliche of treating the natives as noble savages — this isn’t <i>Little Big Man </i>— and a frenetic sequence where the camp is beset by armed braves, Iñárritu’s camera darting from one muddy conflict to the next, has a purity of vision. Repeated visions of Glass’ dead wife and a single shot of a comet blazing to earth suggest some religious subtext, and indeed Glass himself is born/reborn multiple times; from the grave, from a makeshift sweat lodge, from the literal belly of a beast, but the film lacks the thematic framework to support this reading. </span><br />
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<span class="s1">Perhaps the natives represent a brutal sort of honour, Fitz stands for base pragmatism, and Glass must walk a path between the two </span>— what he wants and what is right — but again that could just be my projecting. </div>
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Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography has a chilly radiance and majesty, making the most of the film’s natural palette of whites, browns, and greens, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto's ominous ambient score rising above the biting wind, and Iñárritu’s direction is superlatively competent, but <i>The Revenant </i>is not a film characterised by its artistry. Also, lacking, the opportunities for humour afforded to <i>Birdman</i>, it can't help but come across as incredibly self-serious.</div>
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What do we learn from <i>The Revenant </i>then? We learn that leaving your weapon lodged in your opponent’s calf leaves you open to getting it back blade first and that films universally described as “visceral” and “immersive” often have little else to say. The Revenant is all sinew and no heart; a period cod-Malick <i>Death Wish</i> with illusions of grandeur. Let’s just hope the Academy come to their collective senses and see fit to award <i>Spotlight</i>; otherwise the next mission of vengeance might not be cinematic but it may well be cinema-related (which is to say I intend to bitch about it online).<br />
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<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<b><i>The Revenant </i>gets a 7 out of 10.</b></h3>
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Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-84080531104330008132016-01-17T15:52:00.000-08:002016-01-17T15:56:31.273-08:00CREED<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Few film series have taken the beating in their time that <i>Rocky</i> has. After a triumphant first bout that launched Sylvester Stallone into the big-time, the series steadily descended into cheesy self-parody. After the judge’s decision of <i>Rocky IV</i> — great villain, hilarious overuse of musical montages — and the knockdown loss of <i>Rocky V</i> — which ended with the Italian Stallion beating some ginger lout in a street brawl — <i>Rocky Balboa </i>allowed the former champ (both the title character and Stallone himself) to make a semi-graceful exit. Now, nine years on, Stallone returns to the role that first made his name; if only to hand the franchise over to the next generation.</div>
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<span class="s1"><i>Creed</i> opens thirteen years after the death of the legendary Apollo. His illegitimate son, Adonis Johnson, is serving time in juvie; that is until his father’s widow, Mary Anne (Phyllicia Rashad), arrives and offers him a new life, one where he’ll no longer have to fight to survive. Fighting, though, is more than just a means of survival to Adonis: it’s a way of life. In the present day, the now adult Donnie (Michael B. Jordan) quits his job at a respectable finance company and heads out to Philadelphia looking for the long-retired Rocky, the man who was ringside the night Apollo died. Donnie’s aim: to receive training and become a champion in his own right.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The film’s premise is well-worn and one that could easily descend into hokiness. Ever since the first <i>Expendables </i>film made landfall back in 2005, Stallone has been steadily milking us for our nostalgia dollars at the cost of any artistic credibility he once had. However, in the hands of up-and-coming filmmaker Ryan Coogler, <i>Creed </i>is, stylistically a least, a much different creature from the film’s that preceded. Where Rocky had its slurring protagonist laying smackdowns on slabs of slaughterhouse beef to the tune of Survivor, Creed replaces dramatic brute force with speed, agility, and surprising pathos in dealing with its parallel themes of coming in and going out.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><i>Creed</i> finds Rocky dealing with the ongoing despair of losing everyone he cares about. Living alone and pushing seventy, all he wants to do is quietly run his restaurant and visit the graves of his wife and recently deceased brother-in-law. Stallone totally sells the weariness of the former Italian Stallion, a man whose sheer tenacity made him a champion but who has more or less put himself out to pasture. Diagnosed with non-Hogkin's lymphoma, he’s resigned to laying down and dying until Donnie gives him a reason to fight. A sort of meathead Mr. Miyagi, Stallone has certainly come a long way since he first laced up the gloves forty years ago and <i>Creed </i>just wouldn’t be the same without the sense of history he brings to the role.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">That being said, Creed is all about the rising star for whom Stallone dignifiedly makes way — this is the first film in the franchise he didn’t script himself. Whereas <i>Rocky </i>was very much a rags-to-riches story, <i>Creed</i> is all about one man’s struggle to live up to a legend. Jordan brings an understated focus and determination to Donnie, whose laid-back demeanour conceals serious abandonment issues. Donnie may drive a Mustang and come from a mansion, but he’s no less worthy a fighter, and the film simply finds its dramatic mileage elsewhere. His relationship with gigging alt R&B artist Bianca (Tessa Thompson), for instance, is grounded in simplicity.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Having previously worked with Jordan in his directorial debut, <i>Fruitvale Station</i>, Ryan Coogler proves here that he also has an eye for action. His kinetic approach — camera tightly tracking each combatant’s footwork, getting in close for every flash-bang exchange — imbues each match with a power and fluidity that make for exhilarating viewing. Maryse Alberti’s cinematography brings a crispness and polish worthy of an ESPN title match, plunging into the utter blackness backstage as a burst of flame signifies the arrival of Creed’s final opponent, light heavyweight champion “Pretty” Ricky Conlon (real-life professional boxer Tony Bellew).</span></div>
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<span class="s1">After the elegiac overtones of 2006’s <i>Rocky Balboa</i>, <i>Creed</i> signifies a rebirth for the franchise. Essentially a soft reboot in the manner of the new <i>Star Wars</i> or <i>Mad Max</i>, the film throws away the worst of what's come before while doing justice to the very best. The result is a slicker, tighter experience that any the series has given us before; one that, like the title characters, earns it stripes. While its previously declining pedigree may have held it back from the Best Picture race, <i>Creed</i> is a powerful piece of cinema in its own right. When Donnie sums up his whole motivation for fighting in a single sentence, or Bill Conti’s iconic theme starts up, manly tears are a distinct possibility.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><i>Creed </i>gets an 8.0 out of 10</span></h3>
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Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-75602343493941279492016-01-16T09:02:00.000-08:002016-01-16T09:08:27.667-08:00MACBETH (2015)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What do you think is the greatest Shakespeare adaptation ever committed to celluloid? Perhaps you favor the expressionistic majesty and revelry of Welles’ <em>Chimes at Midnight</em>, or maybe the jazzy, black-and-white sophistication of Joss Whedon’s contemporary <em>Much Ado</em>. For all the promise of its conception, Justin Kurzel’s <em>Macbeth</em> does not stand among their exalted ranks.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A resolutely period piece staged among the misty bluffs and pale yellow gorse of the Scottish Highlands, the film begins with blood as two warring, jerkin-clad clans tear into each other with sword and teeth. The action cuts back and forth between epic slow-mo and chaotic real-time – the thunder of footfall as the factions clash is like the diving rain. This juxtaposition of the mythic and the actual, thanks to Chris Dickens’ sturdy editing, immediately suggests a thesis: that these larger-than-life events – the fate of nations, rise and fall of kings – are lit by the forgotten funeral pyres of men, women, and children.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Macbeth (Michael Fassbender), meanwhile, stands still amid the carnage that throngs around him, staring out at the Weird Sisters, the Witches that will lead him on to regicide and tyranny. Unlike in, say, the Rupert Goold adaptation, which starred Patrick Stewart and in which they desired vengeance – Fassbender is the last of the Professor X/Magneto duos to star in The Scottish Play – their motivation here is utterly unfathomable, as are the origins of the weird tribal scars that mark their faces. The dead children here belong to Macbeth and his wife (Marion Cotillard), whose ambition it is suggested is born of some grief-stricken instinct.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Strange then that the film is otherwise so muted: Fassbender’s Macbeth, rather than some theatrical monster, is a weak, easily manipulated warrior who, once the crown is upon his head, quickly lapses into paranoia and distraction. Where he is feverish and increasingly impulsive, all sickly grins, Cotillard’s Lady Macbeth is pale and icy – her sea-green eyes flash with annoyance or swell with tears as she dwells upon her loss. From Macbeth’s own weapon-adorned shack to the opulent seaside castle he comes to inhabit, and even upon the remote and craggy bluffs, the film’s reserve provides the feeling of a chamber piece.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dun and desolate, <em>Macbeth</em>’s supporting cast – David Thewslis’ meek yet authoritative Duncan, Paddy Considine’s darkly watchful Banquo, Sean Harris’ coiled Macduff – are equally able but uninspired. Jed Kurzel’s warlike score provides as certain charge to proceedings and Adam Arkapaw’s cinematography brings a gritty clarity to brackish sprays of blood and hellish images of forests aflame. The film loses the poetry amidst the dour pseudo-realism of Medieval Scotland. The depth of meaning in Shakespeare’s text, reworked by Todd Louiso, Jacob Koskoff, and Michael Lesslie, quietly slips away.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A somewhat flat study of a brutal world where suffering perpetuates itself down through the generations, Kurzel’s <em>Macbeth</em> may be too bleak a reading of an ultimately hopeful tragedy – a not unforeseeable outcome from the director of <em>Snowtown</em>. Where Welles, Polanski, or Kurosawa offered insight, this is merely texture; a <em>Macbeth</em> that lacks not only significance but also the sound and fury that might make the most of its quick-burning runtime.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></b><b style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Macbeth </i>gets a 6.5 out of 10</b></span></h3>
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Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-34978025357830270982016-01-16T07:39:00.003-08:002016-01-17T15:29:37.777-08:00ROOM<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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SPOILERS!<br />
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We take a lot for granted out in the world. It’s full
of space and objects, enough so that we can overlook just how much
“thingness” there is to our everyday existence. Imagine a world then of
only ten feet by ten feet, a world where every item has a sense of
permanency to it: Bed, Wardrobe, Skylight. It's in this confined
universe that five-year-old Jack (Jacob Tremblay) has lived every day,
slept every night, unaware of anything else — Room is the only world he
has ever known.<br />
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Adapted from Emma Donoghue’s Booker shortlisted novel, <em>Room</em> is a minor masterpiece in microcosm. The film quickly establishes the minutiae that makes up the routine between him and Ma (<em>Short Term</em>
12’s Brie Larson): running “track”, back and forth between two walls;
skewering egg shells on string to make mobiles; or just watching TV. At
night, though, Old Nick (<em>Deadwood</em>’s Sean Bridgers) comes calling. Only he knows the number to open Door.<br />
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As directed by <em>Frank</em>’s
Lenny Abrahamson, Room starts off a study in microcosm and mythology.
Jack’s starry-eyed voice-over creates a sense of wonder at odds with the
mottled brown walls, the ugly wear and tear of their environment. Ma
clearly adores him, but she has off days, days of frustration and
depression. How many more birthdays can Jack spend in this nutshell
(even if he does count himself a king of infinite space)? The only
option is escape.<br />
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<em>Room</em>
is, after all, also about survival. Jack is understandably unwilling to
accept Ma’s changing story about the nature of reality. The film is so
grounded in Room and Jack’s embracing of its limitations that its second
act gear shift feels tense; not just because of the likelihood of
discovery by their guarded captor but in the disorienting scale and
Space that lies beyond Room. It’s impossible to imagine what the
equivalent might be for us.<br />
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Tremblay turns in an utterly
convincing performance as Jack. Neither cloying nor obnoxious as his
angelic features and Samson hair might suggest, he embodies instead both
naivety and resilience: coddle and presumptuous, but with enough
elasticity in him to bounce back. While Jack is arguably the lead, Brie
Larson’s traumatised Ma — otherwise known as Joy Newsome — is no less
remarkable; desperately trying, but layered in guilt, anger, and grief.<br />
<br />
Their
reintegration into society is not a seamless one. Luckily then, there
is also grandma, Nancy (three-time Oscar nominee Joan Allen), warm if
timid, and her new beau, the shaggy, easygoing Leo (Canadian actor Tom
McCamus). William H. Macy is largely sidelined as Grandpa Robert, unable
to deal with the sight of his ill-begotten grandchild, but he makes the
most of his brief screen-time; craggy, industrious, and silently
heartbroken.<br />
<em><br /></em>
<em>Room</em>’s first half is extraordinary in its
presentation of a tight, self-contained world, but it becomes when it
dares to take the lid off that box. It’s only once we step outside that
we see Jack and Ma’s surroundings in more than just cross-section.
Donoghue’s script and Abrahamson’s direction crystallizes the potential
for joy and tragedy in the smallest moments; your first present or lick
from a dog. <em>Room</em>, simply put, is life.<br />
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<b><i><br /></i></b></h3>
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<b><i>Room </i>gets 9 out of 10</b></h3>
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Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-66278298813918478132016-01-09T16:16:00.000-08:002016-02-29T03:13:47.003-08:00THE HATEFUL EIGHT<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisZFhkHuZQcYYZhbNgHja-rVJKoX2Ashb-_06z8CgOTuNIZ_A9ksJF6WN_SVGAe4wMhvyz05UyZOwgr2bEDzDXipyft-mWDupjC2NyJjTlqIhnJFEIGuPosahhijOlc5DGDfvJeIsjAFgg/s1600/h8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisZFhkHuZQcYYZhbNgHja-rVJKoX2Ashb-_06z8CgOTuNIZ_A9ksJF6WN_SVGAe4wMhvyz05UyZOwgr2bEDzDXipyft-mWDupjC2NyJjTlqIhnJFEIGuPosahhijOlc5DGDfvJeIsjAFgg/s400/h8.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
Say what you want about his handling of race<span style="font-size: x-small;">1</span> or his cribbing from other filmmakers<span style="font-size: x-small;">2</span>, but one thing's certain about Quentin Tarantino: love him or hate him<span style="font-size: x-small;">3</span>, he’s one hell of a showman. <br />
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That’s perhaps never been clearer than with the recent hubbub surrounding the screening of <i>The Hateful Eight</i>.<span style="font-size: x-small;">4</span> Not only is it not being shown at several notable UK cinema chains, including Cineworld<span style="font-size: x-small;">5</span>, but the Odeon Leicester Square<span style="font-size: x-small;">6</span> is currently being dominated by an Ultra Panavision 70 “Roadshow” version of the film, which includes an interlude scored by illustrious film composer Ennio Morricone<span style="font-size: x-small;">7</span>, a twenty-minute intermission<span style="font-size: x-small;">8</span>, and a program.<span style="font-size: x-small;">9</span><br />
<br />
Running a potentially bum-numbing 187 minutes all in, the program puts this format of <i>The Hateful Eight </i>— apparently Tarantino’s <span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">preferred</span>10</span> — in a pantheon that includes the likes of <i>Lawrence of Arabia</i>, <i>Gone with the Wind</i>, and <i>Cleopatra</i>.<span style="font-size: x-small;">11</span> In any case, it’s the sort of film-going experience I've not seen in my lifetime and one perfectly suited to the grandiose theatrical style of the film at hand.<br />
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Opening amid the snow and sunlight of 1870s Wyoming<span style="font-size: x-small;">12</span>, <i>The Hateful Eight </i>takes its time in drawing together its characters. The natural beauty<span style="font-size: x-small;">13</span> contrasts with the (exquisitely snappy) human ugliness that is to unfold. First, we have John Ruth AKA The Hangman (a wonderfully whiskery and belligerent Kurt Russell)<span style="font-size: x-small;">14</span>, and his prisoner, the leering, foul-mouthed Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">)</span>15, <span style="font-size: small;">making their way across the landscape in a stagecoach that John Wayne himself would have been proud to be shot at in.<span style="font-size: x-small;">16</span></span></span> <br />
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Shortly they are joined by one Major Marquis Warren (a sharp-dressed, sharp-eyed Samuel L. Jackson), a fellow bounty-hunter and former Union Officer with a bounty of his own to collect.<span style="font-size: x-small;">17</span> If that weren’t enough they<span style="font-size: x-small;">18</span> are also joined by Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins)<span style="font-size: x-small;">19</span>, a rambling, vaguely goofy ex-militiaman and supposed Sheriff of Red Rock, their shared destination. Desperate to get out of the encroaching blizzard, the coach’s occupants — and driver — seek refuge at Minnie’s Haberdashery, an isolated stopover.<br />
<br />
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnRbXn4-Yis<br />
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It’s here we finally encounter<span style="font-size: x-small;">20</span> the other four that make up the title group: Bob The Mexican (Demián Bichir channeling Eli Wallach)<span style="font-size: x-small;">21</span>; the impeccably mannered, improbably named Oswaldo Mowbray (Tim Roth, reunited with Tarantino after twenty-three years)<span style="font-size: x-small;">22</span>; “Cow Puncher” Joe Gage (Michael Madsen)<span style="font-size: x-small;">23</span>; and, last but not least, Confederate General Sanford “Sandy” Smithers (a wonderfully tetchy Bruce Dern).<br />
<br />
Once the full bunch are neatly confined to the Haberdashery<span style="font-size: x-small;">24 </span>for the duration, <i>The Hateful Eight </i>begins smoothly switching gears, transitioning from a history-driven commentary on some classic Western subjects — namely the Civil War and atrocities committed during which<span style="font-size: x-small;">25</span> — to a parlor-room murder mystery<span style="font-size: x-small;">26 </span>to a bloody climax that enjoyably apes much of Tarantino’s past work<span style="font-size: x-small;">27<span style="font-size: small;">; even if the whole thing </span></span>never quite narratively pays off.<span style="font-size: x-small;">28</span><br />
<br />
Past glories and familiar pleasures these may be (including the <i>ad absurdum</i> bandying of a certain racial slur), but the film feels vitally alive. It’s just a shame when that the finely-tuned mechanism begins to wind down and character agendas come to fore the focus swings inexorably away from verbiage and towards violence.<span style="font-size: x-small;">29</span> While the film’s title is obviously a homage to John Sturges’ iconic men-on-a-mission movie<span style="font-size: x-small;">30</span>, this is Tarantino at his broadest and most literary: <i>Murder on the Orient Express</i> meets Elmore Leonard with a healthy dose of Grand Guignol.<span style="font-size: x-small;">31</span><br />
<br />
Jackson continues to be the perfect cinematic embodiment of wily indignation — his hackles go up, nostrils flare, eyes widen, and you know someone is getting trampled.<span style="font-size: x-small;">32 </span>Warrens’ gleefully nasty monologue to the unrepentently bigoted Sanford about his outrageous<span style="font-size: x-small;">33</span> treatment of a would-be headhunter is spellbinding; the camera pedestals up to crotch level as Dern’s eyes reflect dawning horror. “Starting to see pictures, ain't ya?”<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, Russell’s interrogative, unexpectedly sentimental Ruth stirs the pot<span style="font-size: x-small;">34</span> while Leigh adds a spiteful spice to the stew<span style="font-size: x-small;">35</span>, and the rest of the cast bubble along nicely, popping to the surface as the script demands. While it's become a cliche to say this of settings, Minnie’s Haberdashery is a character in its own right: wide, expansive, full of nooks, corners, and
potential murder weapons<span style="font-size: x-small;">36</span> — the sort of space, if you have to be
indoors, that lends itself to the widescreen format.<span style="font-size: x-small;">37 </span><br />
<br />
In the end, though, <i>The Hateful Eight</i> boils down to wit and blood (often in tandem)<span style="font-size: x-small;">38 </span>and a few under-cooked notions about racial relations in Reconstruction Era America.<span style="font-size: x-small;">39</span> Self-indulgent? Certainly.40 Revisionist? Undoubtedly. But with apparently only two films left till self-imposed retirement, it’s hard to think how Tarantino will top this magnificently abominable spectacle.<br />
<br />
<b><i>The Hateful Eight </i>gets an 8 out of 10</b><br />
<br />
<br />
SPOILERS!<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">1 </span>As two of the foremost debaters of race politics in modern cinema it’s a shame — if perhaps somewhat inevitable — that Tarantino and Spike Lee should be permanently at loggerheads. Maybe Samuel L. Jackson could arrange a sit-down.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">2 </span>Working my way through the Godard collection has reminded me just how much he owes to the likes of <i>Vivre Sa Vie</i>, from which Mia Wallace’s speech in <i>Pulp Fiction</i> about comfortable silences is lifted almost wholesale. There’s also, in the case of <i>The Hateful Eight</i>, Sergio Corbucci’s <i>The Great Silence</i> and Robert Altman’s <i>Mr. & Mrs. Miller </i>(as two other wintry Western); the latter of which I owe a debt to Rob Daniel at Electric Shadows (www.electric-shadows.com) for pointing out.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">3</span> I kind of have mixed feelings about him personally. He’s a loudmouth and a braggart, but he’s generally pretty with it; the worst you could accuse him is being a purveyor of insensitive cine-literate schlock. I sorta comes down to what The Dude says about Walter in <i>The Big Lebowski</i>: “You’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole.”<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">4</span> A troubled production from the off, <i>The Hateful Eight </i>was actually canned for a bit after the script leaked. Tarantino only decided to go ahead with it after a promising staged reading, though he did revise the ending a bit; more on which later.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">5 </span>After Cineworld put out a general statement to this effect — “"Sadly we haven't been able to come to an agreement with the distributor which means it won't be shown at Cineworld” — the distributors in question, Entertainment Film, actually released their own press statement, which put the blame squarely at Cineworld’s door and, in a hilariously ballsy move, apologized to Unlimited card-holders for the inconvenience.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">6 </span>The apparent bone of contention between the two was apparently that Cineworld wanted the roadshow version screened at Picturehouse Central — which seats 344 — instead of Odeon Leicester Square — which seats 1,680 and was packed out at the screening I attended. There’s may be more to the story than this, but, if not, way to through your toys out the pram, Cineworld.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">7</span> Which includes unused excerpts from his score for John Carpenter’s <i>The Thing </i>(strangely appropriate given the parallels). In any case, it proves an inspired choice: the evocative use of strings creates a genuine sense of dread straight from the overture. Glad that Tarantino and Morricone were able to kiss and make up after the former swore never to work with the latter again. It couldn’t have hurt that <i>The Hateful Eight</i> is refreshingly light on the anachronistic soundtrack; only a touch of Roy Orbison and The White Stripes to leaven the mood.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">8</span> Which was nice. I got ice cream.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">9 </span>And only £20 a ticket. Given going to any screening at the OLS will set you back £15, it’s well worth the few extra quid, if just for the augmented experience.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">10 </span>While I respect a filmmaker with strong ideas about how their films should be viewed, I’ll confess to having been tempted to write this review as though I’d only watched <i>The Hateful Eight</i> on my phone… as an illegal download… on the Tube… in vertical… and then Tweet it at him. I may yet.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">11</span> Or, as the program puts it, “pays homage to and recreates the grand film exhibition style popularized in the 1950s and ‘60s and that brought audiences to theaters with the promise of a special event.”<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">12 </span>The version of the screenplay that’s available online for Oscar consideration (http://twcguilds.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/H8_SCRIPT_CleanedUp_Final1.pdf) puts it “six or eight or twelve years after the Civil War”, which puts <i>The Hateful Eight</i> at least a decade and a bit after the events of <i>Django Unchained</i>; more on this later.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">13 </span>The opening shots — where the uneven snow drifts mirror the broken clouds overhead and snow piles up beneath a stone-hewn roadside crucifix — are breathtaking. Come Oscar time cinematographer Robert Richardson’s gonna likely find himself facing off against Emmanuel Lubezki for the similarly snowy <i>The Revenant</i>. Given Lubezki shot in twelve countries, freezing conditions, using all-natural light, while <i>The Hateful Eight </i>was shot largely in a slightly chilly cabin in Colorado, it could make for an awkward night if Richardson walks away with the trophy. Still, at least the venue will be heated.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">14</span> Russell’s casting would seem to be another callback to <i>The Thing</i>, which, along with <i>Reservoir Dogs</i>, Tarantino cites the film’s key influences.<br />
15 Along with her moving vocal performance as the painfully insecure Lisa in <i>Anomalisa</i> (Charlie Kauffman’s upcoming stop-motion animation), 2016 may be the year that Leigh starts getting the public recognition she deserves after years of sterling supporting roles.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">16</span> The cinematic slaughtering of Native Americans may be the least problematic part of Wayne’s legacy. For more on exactly how Duke was a louse watch <i>Trumbo</i>. Watch <i>Trumbo </i>regardless. It's got Bryan Cranston as Dalton Trumbo via Foghorn Leghorn and is generally a lot of fun.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">17 </span>Major Marquis Warren is just the latest in the pantheon of great screen presences that have come about courtesy of Jackson-Tarantino. His first appearance here, sat sidesaddle astride a stack of three frozen corpses, is the stuff actor’s dreams are made of. Jackson even gets an obscure little callback (perhaps unintentional) to <i>Pulp Fiction </i>when, with Tim Roth present, he asks someone to be calm. The fact that Mr. Blonde from <i>Reservoir Dogs</i> is kicking around makes it all the more meta. Throw in the fact that Marquis’ sartorial choices — yellow lapels, red tie — vaguely recall Jamie Foxx’s powder blue suit in Django — which <i>The Hateful Eight </i>was initially conceived of as a sequel to — and that’s more or less “a bingo”.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">18</span> “They” also includes the stage driver O.B. (James Parks). Given he’s not a member of the titular octet every time he ventures out into the snow I was sure he wasn’t coming back.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">19 </span>Who is finally starting to be recognised as a major player after years of first-grade work on TV; most recently as silver-tongued career criminal Boyd Crowder in <i>Justified</i>. Presumably the fact that <i>Justified</i> was inspired by Elmore Leonard who was a notable influence on Tarantino’s style gave Goggins some useful preparation.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">20</span> After the better part of an hour of travel mainly given over to conversations ranging from Civil War atrocities to correspondence with the late President Lincoln.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">21</span> Brilliantly/bizarrely, Bichir apparently taught himself to play piano in order to do justice to a scene where Bob painstakingly single-fingers out Silent Night on the piano. Admittedly it’s an important moment.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">22 </span>As a delightfully smarmy supposed hangman pontificating on the need for dispassion in dispensing justice, Roth is something of a scene-stealer; making the most of a supporting role clearly written for Christoph Waltz, who, one supposes, was busy making <i>Spectre</i>. Let’s hope the presumed difference in pay compensates for the definite artistic gulf.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">23 </span>Who, as time passes, increasingly resembles Mickey Rourke. All the more impressive, Madsen did it without decades of cumulative plastic surgery.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">24</span> Having given us the lie of the land upon their arrival — and indeed, staked them out — it’s a shame that the film never returns to such exotic locales as “the outside privvy” and “the barn”.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">25</span> While very much “on the side” of Warren, Tarantino’s script doesn’t dismisses his counterpoint— Lost Causer Mannix —outright. Burning black settlements in rejection of unconditional surrender is certainly an atrocity, but Marquis certainly isn’t on the side of the angels. Even Sandy Smithers gets some feeble pathos when he plaintively enquires about the fate of his lost son.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">26 </span><i>The Hateful Eight</i> has been called Agatha Christie with guns, but the film never invests in its clues. Who dropped the jelly bean? Why is the door latch broken? When the answers do come about it’s neat, but that’s about it.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">27 </span>Let’s just say it’s not the first time someone has ever been gut-shot. Or the last that we're likely see Red Apple tobacco.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">28 </span>Returning from the interval to find Tarantino himself narrating another look at the previous scene is a touch disconcerting. Then again, elegance and simplicity have been falling on the list of Tarantino’s narrative concerns. They likely now sit somewhere below “chapter headings”.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">29 </span>The mistrust and tension that’s present straight from start means it was always likely that x or y might catch a bullet. I just occasionally found myself wishing it all meant a bit more. Then again, I didn’t complain when the eponymous beastie was chowing down indiscriminately in The Thing, so maybe it’s a human agency thing.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">30</span> And true enough, each of the eight claims to be on a mission: Ruth is taking Domergue to hang; Warren is cashing in corpses; Mannix is en route to his signing in; Bob is manning the store till the owners return; Mowbray is returning to duty as the Red Rock hangman; Gage is heading to visit his mother on the other side of the mountain; and Smithers is going to commemorate his son. Their real agendas are quite another matter to unpick.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">31</span> Heads detonate, blood is vomited (in gouts). Effects gurus Howard Berger and Greg Nicotero certainly earned their salt on this one.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">32</span> As the film’s gun-toting sleuth — pistolero Poirot, Magnum-wielding Marple, etc., etc. — he’s definitely got no compunction about dealing justice before all the facts are in. As he says to Ruth the Hangman — so called ‘cause he always brings his bounty in alive — “Nobody said [the job’s] supposed to be that hard, either!”<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">33</span> Morally and just, you know, generally.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">34 </span>The other Western Russell’s in this year, <i>Bone Tomahawk</i>, promises to be even more explicitly gory. My review should be winging its way shortly to one site or another.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">35 </span>Tarantino revealed to Christopher Nolan (of all people) that he wrote a draft of the screenplay from Daisy’s POV alone, just to justify all the brutal shit he puts her through. <br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">36 </span>I kept waiting for someone to get spiked with that hammer they keep using to nail up the front door. Spoiler alert: no one does. :(<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">37 </span>I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself the king of infinite space if I had Tarantino to film it. When he suddenly cuts to a tracking shot from above the ceiling, looking down at the characters through the loose boards, there’s a release of tension I didn’t realise was present.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">38 </span>I refer you to the previous footnote when I quote Ruth in saying, “Now, Daisy, I want us to work out a signal system of communication. When I elbow you real hard in the face, that means: shut up.” In this case, the punctuation came before the sentence.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">39 </span>There’s a half-baked commentary on racial harmony in there somewhere. With the bandits having already taken out Minnie’s idyllic <i>Little House on the Prairie</i>/United Colors of Benetton-style former occupants (including a cheery, if out-of-place Zoe Bell), black and white can only come together — notably while dying — to string up someone worse. Who that’s meant to be, though, who knows.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">40</span> Much like this review you may think.</div>
Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-46997468558389349902016-01-04T15:08:00.000-08:002016-01-24T09:36:37.900-08:00AN INSTITUTIONAL FAILINGS DOUBLE BILL (SPOTLIGHT & THE BIG SHORT)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Sorry it's been so long since I last published - it's been a busy couple of months. I'm trying out a new thing as part of this double bill. The first review has footnotes; the second does not. Let me know which style you prefer and I'll stick to it from hereon out.</i> </div>
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REVIEW: Spotlight</h2>
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As a drama about child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, Tom McCarthy’s latest, <i>Spotlight</i>, has a lot to do with second chances. For those involved in the story, namely the titular investigative at the Boston Globe, it’s a second chance to take on an injustice that had gone undiscussed for more than a quarter of a century.<span style="font-size: x-small;">1</span> For McCarthy it’s also a chance to once more touch upon a grand modern theme — the decline of print journalism — that the fifth season of <i>The Wire</i> arguably shortchanged in favor of personal axe-grinding on the part of show-runner David Simon.<span style="font-size: x-small;">2 </span><br />
<br />
While the cover-up would seem to have been something of an open secret for many years, it wasn’t until the arrival of new editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber)<span style="font-size: x-small;">3 </span>in 2001 that the Globe deigned to really look into the allegations. A New York Jew with no skin in the game, so to speak<span style="font-size: x-small;">4</span>, the soft-spoken Baron seizes upon a small column as catalyst for an in-depth Spotlight investigation. Against an organization that thinks in centuries, though, it’s understandably an uphill struggle.<br />
<br />
Led by the shrewd, craggy veteran, Walter “Robbie” Robinson (Michael Keaton)<span style="font-size: x-small;">5</span>, the team is comprised of well-meaning pain-in-the-ass Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo)<span style="font-size: x-small;">6</span>, the tireless Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), family man Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James); and, off to one side, the sceptical, even oppositional supervisor Ben Bradlee (John Slattery). All lapsed Catholics to one degree or another,<span style="font-size: x-small;">7</span> they’ve spent their lives in close proximity to the Church and its representatives. but even they aren’t prepared for the level of deliberate blindness they must confront.<br />
<br />
This can be seen in the guise of two lawyers, litigators to be precise: the amiable Eric MacLeish (an engagingly slimy Billy Crudup), who seems to have made negotiating under-the-table settlements with the Church into something of a cottage industry<span style="font-size: x-small;">8</span>, and would-be ally Mitchell Garabedian (an intense, shout-y Stanley Tucci)<span style="font-size: x-small;">9</span>, who refuses to even let them take notes. In a city where the judge might well inquire what parish you belong to, he has every reason to be paranoid.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EwdCIpbTN5g" width="560"></iframe>
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<br />
Within the broader scope of these systemic abuses, <i>Spotlight</i> also singles out heart-rending individual stories. There’s the hard-knocks former Southie kid, shortly to become father, who was abused when at his most vulnerable, and a bashful gay man who relates how a priest convinced him to play strip poker — “Of course I lost”, he says with a sad little smile. These are the stories that, up until the Boston Globe’s investigation, were largely ignored. “If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one”, says Garabedian, and the paper bares some culpability in this.<span style="font-size: x-small;">10</span><br />
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With its crisp yet faded cinematography from Masanobu "Masa" Takayanagi (<i>Silver Linings Playbook</i>, <i>Warrior</i>), Howard Score’s solemn piano score, and masterful performances, <i>Spotlight </i>deftly handles complex moral and social issues. The note that Carroll sticks on the fridge — a warning to his kids about the pedophile down the street — over time gets buried beneath layers of pictures, menus, shopping lists; all the detritus of everyday life. As images go, it’s a sober, considered one, utterly fitting with the film that surrounds it.<br />
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A lot of great cinema has leaped from the wellspring of investigative journalism. There is something inherently dramatic about the search for The Truth (or at least a truth), especially when it goes hand-in-hand with important real-world issues. The best of the genre manage to balance the scope and complexity of the case – case and point: <i>All the President’s Men</i>’s handling of the Watergate scandal in – with the more basic human element. <i>Spotlight</i> is just such a film.<br />
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<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<b><i>Spotlight</i> gets 9 out of 10</b></h3>
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1 The film opens at a police station circa 1976 where representatives of the Church, in conjunction with an Assistant DA, are participating in hushing up one such incident. “I guess the Father was ‘helping out’”, a stocky old-timer wryly comments to a redheaded rookie as a likely sex offender is ushered into the back of a snow-frosted black sedan and away from prosecution. It's a scene whose cinematography and corruption would feel equally at home in <i><a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-black-mass/" target="_blank">Black Mass</a></i>.<br />
2 In it McCarthy, also an actor, played Scott Templeton, a self-righteous fabulist whose largely concocted stories earn him career advancement and even a Pulitzer Prize. <br />
3 Wonderfully understated in mutton-chops and wire-frame specs.<br />
4 As Spotlight team member Carroll says, “The new editor of the Boston Globe is an unmarried man of the Jewish faith who hates baseball” — and why shouldn’t he be?<br />
5 A small but well-crafted character may seem like a step back after his extravagant leading man performance in <i>Birdman</i> — which I would argue deserved the Oscar over Eddie Redmayne’s technically brilliant but strangely unaffected Stephen Hawking — but it’s great just to see him acting again. Next up, <i>Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian</i> (or not, as one might hope).<br />
6 Who continues to prove himself the most dependable character actor of his generation: <i>Zodiac</i>, T<i>he Kids Are All Right</i>, <i>Shutter Island</i>, <i>Foxcatcher</i>, <i>Infinitely Polar Bear</i>. Twitchy and impassioned, and again sporting an unflattering barnet, nobody does relatably tortured humanity quite like him.<br />
7 One of <i>Spotlight</i>’s most emotionally raw moments comes when Rezendes, angry and frustrated, reveals the hope he had held of eventually returning to the Church — a reminder that, for all its culpability and wrongdoing, of the comfort and security the institution represents to many people.<br />
8 Though the film is wise enough to give these dealings another dimension.<br />
9 Cagey and hostile, Garabedian would be immensely unlikable were it not for the plain-dealing bluntness Tucci helps to make borderline endearing. <br />
10 <a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-truth/" target="_blank"><i>Truth</i>,</a> meanwhile, fails as a film about journalism precisely because it fails to hold its journalists to a higher standard. By taking investigatory shortcuts the 60 Minutes team blew their investigation into the allegations that President George Bush had gone AWOL from the Texas National Guard and, as such, essentially let him off the hook. The film prefers to focus on corporate interference and the half-baked notion they may have been set up, and can’t help but feel evasive for it.<br />
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REVIEW: The Big Short</h2>
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You
wouldn't think the recent global financial crisis would be the stuff of
comedy, but, directed and co-written by frequent Will Ferrell
collaborator Adam McKay (<i>Anchorman</i>, <i>Talladega Nights</i>) and with an
all-star cast, including Christian Bale, Steve Carrell, and Ryan
Gosling, <i>The Big Short </i>makes for a highly entertaining (and instructive)
study of greed, fraud, and the three groups of people who sought to
profit from the meltdown before it happened. </div>
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When
hedge fund manager and former medical doctor Michael Burry, Phd. (a yet-again transformed Bale)
discovers that America’s booming housing market is built on a bedrock of
bad loans, he decides to bet against it through a series of credit
default swaps — a whole new type of deal that will compensate him if and
when the number of mortgage owners defaulting hits critical mass and
the whole thing collapses. Since no one else can foresee that happening,
the banks are all-too eager to take his money.<br />
<br />
As a result, shark-like
investor Jared Vennett (a dark-eyed, oh-so-slick Gosling) can smell
money in the water and, seeing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity get seriously rich,
ropes in trader Mark Baum (a fuming Carrell) and his team into putting
up the cash. Ignorance may be bliss, but they’re using the knowledge to
beat the market while there’s still a market to beat.<br />
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From
Gosling’s slick opening narration about the birth of modern banking —
and frequent breaking of the fourth wall throughout the film’s
two-hour-ten-minute run-time (“I never hung out with these guys. I had
fashion friends” — to its use of of handy popup definitions for
financial jargon and celebrity info-dumps (see: Margot Robbie explaining
subprime mortgages from a bubble bath), <i>The Big Short </i>manages to convey
the highly convoluted information necessary to tell it story in a form
that’s not only bearable but fascinating.<br />
<br />
It's all the more impressive that this
mockumentary style doesn’t detract from the drama, but instead serves to
heighten it, making it perfectly clear the exact stakes at play <br />
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It takes a guy with a glass eye and a Supercuts haircut to figure out that
the bubble — which as Michael’s boss snarkily notes, as a bubble, no one can see — is
about to burst. Characterized by distracted mutters and the occasional crooked smile, Michael may be superior and uncommunicative, but he’s
also the only one checking the numbers, the only one who sees the
situation can’t last.</div>
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Nobody that is except Carrell's Mark.<br />
<br />
A cynical man
made angry by tragedy, Mark interrupts a
support meting to rant about the corruption he sees every day. A rogue element, work at a bank but not for a bank, his team — including comically dour Hamish Linklater, Jeremy
Strong, and Rafe Spall as an optimistic foodie — initially think it
sounds simultaneously too good to believe and too terrible to
comprehend.<br />
<br />
Cutaways to clouds moving over
Wall Street and shake your money-maker music videos may seem like
distractions, but they lend to the air of distraction that suffuses <i>The
Big Short</i>. Mark realizes that the world economy might collapse over sushi
with a smirking shit in an expensive suit — the red lighting and ambient
Sweet Child of Mine only lending to the surreal nightmarishness of the
situation. There’s a definite “final days of the Roman Empire” feel to
the Securities Forum that takes place at Caesar’s Palace and, for all the
technical jargon, the money, it seems, is definitely dumb.</div>
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Frat bro mortgage lenders who target cash rich strippers
looking to invest in property and leave the income section blank; credit
rating agencies scared to refuse to give the bank’s the credit ratings
they desire; and finance journalists refusing to support on the situation
for fear of what they might lose - the whole system is rigged and the whole things about to come tumbling down.<br />
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There are no obvious heroes here. Even the “little guys”
— two plucky young investors from Boulder, Jamie (Finn Witrock) and
Charlie (John Magaro) — are ultimately out for a buck. The first guys to
undercut the AA tranche — don’t worry, this will make a surprising
amount of sense — their mentor, retired banker turned self-sufficient
farmer farmer Ben Rickert (cameo-ing producer Brad Pitt) solemnly
reminds them, it’s ordinary people who will pay the price here. The film
offers up the sobering statistic that when employment goes up 1% 40,000
people die.<br />
<br />
Making a recce down the Florida, the team find whole
upmarket communities abandoned, floors littered with bills; the only
ones left behind are those trying to scrape out a living amidst the
devastation — like the guy who discovers his landlord is a) defaulting
and b) possibly a literal dog. <br />
<br />
<i>The Big Short</i>
connects abstract financial issues to real lives, real stakes. It’s a
very masculine world, one populated by absent husbands and fathers —
Marisa Tomei appears briefly as Mark’s wife, Melissa Leo as an (ironically) near-blind ratings agency rep — where everyone
knows enough to think they’re smart, to think they’ve got it made, and
no one can see that the sky is falling in.<br />
<br />
At best willfully naive, worse
negligent, or worst outright crooks — encouraging people to buy, buy,
buy even as stock goes into free-fall — the film is a desperate plea for
intelligence and awareness; that we listen to Chicken Little.<br />
<br />
As the maxim says, “The truth is like
poetry, and most people fucking hate poetry”; The Big Short simply gives
it a rhythm. When it comes to turning a dry, stats-driven
narrative into an A-Grade dramedy, this is <i>Moneyball</i> standard stuff. Btw, if you’re looking for a stock tip, Michael Burry is
now investing exclusively in water — and if that doesn’t fill you with fear,
you haven’t been paying attention.<br />
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<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<i>The Big Short</i> gets 8.5 out of 10</h3>
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Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-56604583861066919432015-12-24T04:56:00.002-08:002016-01-24T10:05:31.556-08:00STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="st"> </span><br />
<span class="st">"<i>A long time ago</i> in a <i>galaxy</i> far, far away...."</span><br />
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<span class="st">After the prequels more or less managed to strip the gloss off the franchise1, it seems apt that the opening lines of <i>Star Wars: The Force Awakens</i> refer to a sort of redemption.2 This long-awaited, almost mythical follow-up to the Holy Trilogy3 has the added advantage/burden of returning to the three characters we actually care about; namely Luke4, Han, and Leia. It’s smart, therefore, that writer-director/godfather J.J. Abrams5 front-loads the film with the new cast, about whom we will quickly have to feel the same way — and luckily we do.6 <br /><br />On the hero front, we have Finn (John Boyega, <i>Attack the Block</i>) as a conflicted former stormtrooper7, steely yet vulnerable scavenger Rey (newcomer Daisy Ridley)8, and ace pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac, <i>Inside Llewyn Davis</i>)9. As villains, The Force Awakens serves up prissy demagogue General Hux (Domnhall Gleeson, <i>Ex Machina</i>)10, the chrome-suited Captain Phasma (Gwendoline Christie, <i>Game of Thrones</i>)11, and, the best of the bunch, Sith Lord Kylo Ren (Adam Driver, <i>While We're Young</i>)— like Darth Vader with added temper tantrums.12<br /><br />
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<span class="st">Even at 135-minutes long, <i>The Force Awakens</i> barely lets up: within twenty minutes of getting the show on the road, it’s already served up a a brutal massacre, a daring escape, a crash landing. Bringing state-of-the-art CGI to classic space adventure scenarios13, it gives us a world that feels at once new and familiar — and unlike George Lucas’ later tampering with Episodes IV-VI, it crucially feels busy rather than cluttered14. As with the best of the franchise it also boils down to what is essentially a mythic family-driven saga… in space!15<br /><br />Striking a balance between breakneck action16 and moments of serenity17, <i>The Force Awakens </i>gets a lot right before even getting to the original cast. Harrison Ford’s Han is that bit more cantankerous18, his relationship with Leia has an element of sadness to it19, but when John Williams’ magnificent score rises up and rouses the soul all of a sudden its 1983 again20. The film isn’t without originality21, but it feels largely like a riff on what’s come before.22 This is encapsulated in the figure of new droid BB-8 — equal parts R2-D2, Sphero, and Wall-E.23 <br /><br />True, the film skips over more than one important plot beat24 and the second act could be accused of going through the motions25, but as a chance to see a somewhat more grizzled Corellian smuggler banter exasperatedly with a remarkably well-aged Wookie, <i>The Force Awakens</i> is mana from Bespin. Even if the plot is somewhat by-the-numbers26, the film gets the characters exactly right. No politics (for better or worse)27, just pure adventure cinema.28 It’s everything you might hope for, and profoundly satisfying for it, even if there’s nothing truly groundbreaking.29</span><span class="st"><b> </b></span><br />
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<h4 style="text-align: left;">
<span class="st"><b>SUMMARY: <i>Star Wars: The Force Awakens</i> recaptures much of the old magic30, but leaves it to future installments to take the risks<i>. </i>On third viewing31, it gets an 8 out of 10.</b></span></h4>
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<br />
<br />
<span class="st">MAJOR SPOILERS</span></h4>
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<span class="st">1 As with <i>The Two Jakes</i> and <i>The Godfather: Part III,</i> Episodes I-III don’t necessarily taint their successors, but the universe is indefinably ever so slightly worse for their existence. <br />2 It’s always nice to see Max Von Sydow (<i>The Seventh Seal</i>, <i>The Exorcist</i>) in work and his presence here is less distracting than that of Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Kate Fleetwood (Lady Macbeth to Patrick Stewart’s <i>Macbeth</i>) as one-line extras at Starkiller Base.<br />3 Whether or not you’re a bonafide fan, it’s hard to argue against <i>Star Wars</i> and <i>Indiana Jones </i>as perhaps the definitive action-adventure series. <i>The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull</i>, therefore, stands as testament to what can happen when your long-awaited, almost mythical follow-up goes wrong.<br />4 Though Luke is almost entirely absent from proceedings. <i>Star Wars: Episode VII</i> could equally have been subtitled “The Search for Luke”. When he does finally arrives, though, it’s a doozy.<br />5 Abrams’ involvement would seem to be akin to that of Joss Whedon’s figurehead role in the MCU. Call Disney unimaginative but they know a good recipe when they see it.<br />6 It’s to <i>The Force Awakens</i>’ benefit that they don’t simply fall into the archetypes established by their predecessors — hero, rogue, process — but are more like combinations. Boyega’s Finn, for instance, may be a heroic everyman but he’s also got a dark past. It’s a neat twist.<br />7 This is the closest that the franchise has come to anything resembling racial diversity (Oscar Isaac is Hispanic). Hopefully Finn won’t turn out to be the long-lost son of Lando Calrissian.<br />8 There’s a recurring theme here of lost family — Rey’s have inexplicably abandoned her on Jakku. Fingers crossed it doesn’t turn out to be Luke and, based on those cheekbones, possibly his mother’s decoy. The Star Wars universe is quite small enough without everyone being related.<br />9 A secondary character, he’s the closest thing <i>The Force Awakens</i> has to a new Han, albeit with a touch less attitude, a shade more intensity, and open commitment to a cause.<br />10 A Grand Moff Tarkin who’s upgraded to jackboots rather than carpet slippers.<br />11 Phasma has already been called the new Boba Fett. Like Fett, she has some cool armour and, like Fett, she doesn’t actually do very much here. Still, there’s always <i>Episode VIII</i>.<br />12 Driver is magnificent in the role, bringing a compelling undercurrent of anger and shame to a role that could, in other hands, have come across as a self-pitying emo with daddy issues. The film’s not entirely po-faced in its treatment of him either: when he breaks out his lightsaber and proceeds to make Julienne torture chair, two approaching stormtroopers casually do an about-turn. Driver is so convincing that when he and Oscar Isaac shared the screen I almost forgot about this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSwO-k-RqNA).<br />13 The film is essentially a gloss on <i>A New Hope</i>, right down to the accelerated tracking shot through a Mos Eisley-style tavern and a climactic trench run; a fact wryly acknowledged in Han’s line about blowing up what is essentially the Death Star turned up to 11 (“There's always a way to do that.”)<br />14 This is immersive detail as an element of storytelling as opposed to a sign of insecurity or an excuse for another line of toys.<br />15 Space… space… space…<br />16 A sequence where Finn, Rey, Han, Chewie, and two expendable gangs of smugglers are set upon by a trio of toothy, tentacled beasties is entirely surplus to the needs of the plot, but also highly inventive fun that recall the series roots in space adventure serials like Flash Gordon.<br />17 The little look that Han gives Rey upon her seeing an alien world for perhaps the first time — “I didn't think there was this much green in the whole galaxy” — is lovely.<br />18 As presumably is Ford himself. It looks like he really cares here, though; that his reprising the beloved role after thirty years was more than a matter of a rumoured $20-something million pay-check.<br />19 Carrie Fisher is also missing her coke nail from <i>Return of the Jedi</i>.<br />20 Seriously, has any piece of music better summed up a relationship than "Han and the Princess"?<br />21 The moment where Kylo Ren stops a blaster bolt and leaves it quivering in midair is very “Whoa”. The giant, cleave-headed Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis) is more of a “What?” moment. Here’s hoping that, away from the projector, he’s secretly the size of Jiminy Cricket.<br />22 The film’s opening shot of a Star Destroyer eclipsing a luminous planet is entirely in the vein of <i>A New Hope</i>, but when it’s this luscious and loving it’s hard to grouse.<br />23 With R2-D2 almost entirely sidelined for proceedings, there’s no way that Anthony Daniels wasn’t kicking the blue-and-white can between takes. “Fuck you, Kenny Baker. I’m an actor!”<br />24 Four planets are destroyed here by Starkiller Base’s sometime scientifically inexplicable beam-splitter, including the Republic capital, and their passing barely merits a mention. “It’s as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were largely ignored.”<br />25 Rey’s flashbacks upon discovering Luke’s old lightsaber also feel a bit like a plot dump in a film otherwise devoid of exposition.<br />26 Or at least archetypal. Joseph Campbell, eat your heart out.<br />27 The exact distinction between the Resistance and the Republic, and their relationship to the First Order, is unclear, but at least we don’t get mired in any Trade Federation bollocks. <br />28 And cinema-literate adventure at that. The pull focus on three TIE fighters coming out of the sun is cribbed straight from <i>Apocalypse Now</i>. <i>The Force Awakens</i> rewards geekery on multiple levels.<br />29 Even — SPOILER, SPOILER, SPOILER, SPOILER, SPOILER, SPOILER, SPOILER — the tragic death of Han Solo at the hands of his own son, Kylo Ren, recalls both <i>A New Hope</i> (the death of a mentor figure*) and <i>The Empire Strikes Back</i> (only its the son who sends the father tumbling down an air shaft). Doesn’t make it any less affecting, though.<br />When Han calls out “Ben”, apparently Kylo’s real name, I muttered to myself, “No, you’re Ben (Kenobi).<br />30 The final battle between Ren and Rey on the wintry woodland surface of the Starkiller planet is haunting, even if it seems unlikely that a total novice like Rey could overcome a trained Sith. Something something chosen one, perhaps? </span><br />
<span class="st">31 Addendum: Watching the film for a third time the foreshadowing seemed all the clearer. The vision Ren picks out of Rey's mind of an island in a sea of blue is obviously where she finds Luke at the film's epilogue. Having previously been totally against the idea, I'm now sorta okay if Rey turns out to be Luke's kid - after all, she has to come from somewhere, right? Her serenity also contrasts wonderfully with Ren's anger Anger may be a shortcut to power, but it's that much more volatile and harder to control. Also, a 12A, two-and-a-bit hour nostalgia trip is not a fit place to drag an disinterested five year old, random man, even if you are trying to force a bonding experience. My sympathy is all the more limited when you keep rattling your (presumably enormous) keys at random intervals. Still, the fact your kid decided to quietly have a moan at you in the buildup to Ren killing Han was vaguely hilarious. When he then has the freaking audacity to ask why Chewbacca is upset, though, that, that is when you really lose me.</span><br />
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Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-79636469232043260502015-10-29T17:07:00.000-07:002015-12-08T06:29:16.771-08:00SPECTRE<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>I’m a bit torn on this one. The last Bond film, Skyfall, was my
inaugural review on this site, so a big part of me wants to do a real
in-depth analysis on this. The other part of me remembers that brevity
is the soul of wit and is also tired. I’ll compromise: the review itself
will be pretty brief — 300-ish words — but there’s an essay in the
footnotes if you want to read on.</i></div>
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The evocatively titled <i>Spectre</i>, 24th installment of the Bond franchise, is a film steeped in continuity but light on originality.<br />
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While capitalizing on the back-story laid down for Daniel Craig’s super-spy in <i>Casino Royale</i>, <i>Quantum of Solace</i>, and <i>Skyfall</i>,<span style="font-size: x-small;">1</span> it finds the time, over the course of 138 minutes<span style="font-size: x-small;">2</span> to riff on nearly every previous episode from the series’ 53 year history.<span style="font-size: x-small;">3</span> <i>Road to Perdition</i>’s Sam Mendes is back on directing duties and returning screenwriters John Logan/Neal Wade & Robert Purvis are joined by Jez Butterworth.<span style="font-size: x-small;">4</span> From the opening shot of <i>Spectre</i>'s Day of the Dead pre-credit sequence, though, it’s clear that Roger Deakins is no longer on cinematography duties. <i>Interstellar</i>’s Hoyte van Hoytema's work here is impressively layered and textured, primarily with dust, but there’s a lack of the vibrant compositions that made <i>Skyfall</i> so impressive.<span style="font-size: x-small;">5</span></div>
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Despite his very public reservations about the role,<span style="font-size: x-small;">6</span> Craig has lost none of his wry, chiseled gravitas<span style="font-size: x-small;">7</span> – even if he’s beginning to show his age,<span style="font-size: x-small;">8</span> just barely. <i>Spectre</i> gives us Bond at his most vulnerable and exposed – Sam Smith’s controversially quavery theme song, "Writing’s on the Wall", really works in this contextl.<span style="font-size: x-small;">9</span> On the home front, Ralph Fiennes’ M<span style="font-size: x-small;">10</span> is facing down a new threat to the service<span style="font-size: x-small;">11</span> in the form of Andrew Scott’s smug, slimy C,1<span style="font-size: x-small;">2</span> who wants to scrap the 00 program in favor of a mysterious new surveillance system.<span style="font-size: x-small;">13</span> Abroad,<span style="font-size: x-small;">14</span> Bond finds himself in pursuit<span style="font-size: x-small;">15 </span>of a figure from his distant past,<span style="font-size: x-small;">16</span> with a bit of help from Q<span style="font-size: x-small;">17</span> and Moneypenny.<span style="font-size: x-small;">18</span> </div>
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<i>Spectre </i>is full of figures from Bond’s past, the dead<span style="font-size: x-small;">19 </span>and the soon-to-die,<span style="font-size: x-small;">20</span> plus two Bond girls – Monica Bellucci<span style="font-size: x-small;">21 </span>and Lea Seydoux<span style="font-size: x-small;">22</span> – and the first attempt at a classic henchman we’ve had since <i>Die Another Day</i>.<span style="font-size: x-small;">23</span> Amidst all these elements, though, what should be the center-piece – Bond’s traumatic connection to lead villain Franz Oberhauser<span style="font-size: x-small;">24</span> (a reliably urbane Christoph Waltz) – kind of gets lost in the mix.<span style="font-size: x-small;">25</span> Having mined all it can from its protagonist’s troubled personal life, and arguably hit dramatic bedrock,<span style="font-size: x-small;">26</span> <i>Spectre</i> provides a thrilling but deeply flawed conclusion in what seems likely to Craig’s final appearance as Bond.<span style="font-size: x-small;">27</span> With some occasionally perfunctory action<span style="font-size: x-small;">28</span> and a hint of weary absurdity,<span style="font-size: x-small;">29</span> the franchise is in need of a break.<span style="font-size: x-small;">30 </span></div>
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Give it five years or so and, with perhaps less focus on arcs and more on the traditional standalone missions,<span style="font-size: x-small;">31 </span>Chris Nolan in the director’s chair and Tom Hardy in the tux,<span style="font-size: x-small;">32</span> there might just be life in the sexagenarian secret agent yet.<i> </i></div>
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<h2 style="text-align: left;">
<i>Spectre</i> gets a 6 out of 10<b> </b></h2>
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<h4 style="text-align: left;">
<b>SPOILERS (AND GENERALLY SWEARY)!</b><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></h4>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">1</span> Craig’s Bond is the first, of course, to have any real continuity in his films. The closest the series came before this was in recurring characters, like Jaws or Valentin Zukovsky.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">2</span> <i>Spectre </i>is the longest Bond film at about three minutes longer than <i>Casino Royale</i>. Subjectively, though, that might as well be an eternity.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">3 </span>Wingless plane bursts through a snow-covered building full of logs? Check, <i>The Living Daylights </i>(sort of). Oblivious Italian driver ends up on the receiving end of the DB10’s front bumper? Check, every Roger Moore film, more or less. Boat pursuit along the Thames? Check, <i>The World Is Not Enough</i>. Even the villain’s control center seems to be an exact replica of Drax's base in <i>Moonraker,</i> and the car he sends to pick the hero up seems like a definite <i>Goldfinger</i> callback.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">4</span> Butterworth is a fantastic writer — his play <i>Jerusalem</i> features one of the all-time great characters for the stage, Rooster Byron (unforgettably played by Mark Rylance). Given Butterworth’s burgeoning reputation as a script fixer, his work on <i>Spectre</i> doesn’t bode well.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">5</span> Bond’s listening in on that conversation via sniper rifle from a
rooftop definitely recalls <i>Skyfall </i>(sans that lovely blue neon
jellyfish). It’s also nice to see Bond in a proper disguise for once —
even if that “proper disguise” is a masked skeleton at a Day of the Dead
celebration.</div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">6 </span><i>Spectre </i>is Craig’s first acting role in three years and given the amazing pressures attached — the time commitment, staying in shape — it seems increasingly likely he won’t be coming back.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">7</span> Daniel Craig is still perfect in the role (see: the minute double take after the building blows up as if to say, “Did I…? Oh, okay.”).<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">8</span> Unlike Moore, though, who managed an as-yet unbeaten seven films before getting booted from the franchise at age 57, Craig seems ready to leave in the fullness of time. At least Lazenby had that going for him, too.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">9</span> Vis-a-vis a naked Daniel Craig being touched by flaming women — he’s been burned, dammit! —while surrounded by ghosts of the past: Silva leering; Vesper drowning; Le Chiffre doing whatever. Seriously, Mads Mikkelsen is an incredibly talented actor, but has anyone thought at all about Le Chiffre since the end of <i>Casino Royale</i>?<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">10</span> Ralph Fiennes’ M is in a word: “starchy”. He is good, though. “At least now we know what C stands for: careless”. Let’s just say, no one is thinking that. <br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">11</span> Well, the same threat as in the previous film. That whole “spies are irrelevant” bit is beginning to ring true, though. Even Bourne is looking a touch outdated.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">12</span> Andrew Scott (C) is pretty reliable at playing smug and slimy. His character went to school with the Home Secretary, don’t you know? It’s sorta satisfying when he goes the way of <i>Sherlock</i>.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">13</span> This whole surveillance network, “Nine Eyes”, bit feels topical. I wonder if it’ll play into the plot in some meaningful way — no, wait. It doesn’t.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">14</span> There’s a lot of globe-hopping even by Bond’s cosmopolitan standards: from a Day of the Dead festival in Mexico to a car chase through the windy backstreets of Rome to a clinic in the Swiss Alps (a la <i>On Her Majesty’s Secret Service</i>, though Bond’s aversion to health drinks seems more <i>Never Say Never Again</i>), a base in the deserts of Morocco, and the ruins of MI6. It’s amazing Bond can bear to be around so much snow given what happened to his mother and father, and surrogate father, and half-brother…<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">15</span> Oh, look, Bond’s gone (semi-)rogue, again. I think MI5 would panic if he didn’t.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">16 </span>This cutting between Bond’s face and the back of Christoph Waltz’s head certainly seems to imply some sort of connection between them. Hmm, I wonder if he might the other boy from that burned photo… I hope not. That would be an incredible fucking coincidence. Still, Waltz looks great seated in the shadow, whispering over that microphone. Very Max Von Sydow, right down to that Nehru suit he dons later in the film. And that white Persian cat. Wait… KHAN!!!<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">17 </span>Q seems specially impish here, showing off the DB10 to Bond and *only* giving him a watch. And that whole “hands on hips” bit is very Desmond Llewellyn. He even gets in some field work.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">18 </span>And Moneypenny’s making house calls now. Don’t sleep with him, Moneypenny! If you sleep with him the franchise dies!<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">19 </span>Aw, it’s nice to see Judi Dench again, if only on a computer screen and only for two seconds.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">20</span> Poor, beleaguered Mr. White, hiding out in that crumbling manse. That “kite dancing in a hurricane” line sounds good, but what does it actually mean?<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">21</span> And so continues Bond’s long, uncomfortable history of semi-non-consensual sex, which only isn’t rape because he’s James Bond. There’s a line in <i>London Boulevard</i> about Monica Bellucci that’s looking particularly prescient about now. It’s an especial shame in light of the otherwise vaguely progressive fact that Bellucci is the oldest Bond girl, four years older than Craig even.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">22</span> Unlike Lea Seydoux, who is seventeen years younger. But, ooh, is she actually going to properly reject Bond? Could she be a platonic Bond girl? That would be genuinely interesting. I mean, imagine it, Bond gets to show a bit of emotional maturity, character development even, while redeeming himself for failing to save Vesper, which has always been a chip on his shoulder. She even gets to deliver barbs at him aboard a train; all very Eva Green. No, wait, they’re going at it. Shit.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">23</span> And Dave Bautista promises to be the first classic henchman we’ve had in a while. That neat little smile. That eye business was very <i>Game of Thrones</i>, too, albeit done on a 12A certificate. Shame he’s so underused. That train fight was very Red Grant/Teehee/Jaws, and Bond really got the hell beaten out of him for once<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">24 </span>So apparently Blofeld is Bond’s half-brother. Yep, that’s a thing. I wonder if they’ll ever seriously address it in a way that will make up for the sheer level of serendipity involved. It’s as if <i>Return of the Jedi</i> had tried to pretend Darth Vader being Luke’s father was no biggie. The film underplays it, preferring to get down to “Pleasencetries”, but it might have been more convincing if developed just a bit. <br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">25</span> He may be the first villain ever to threaten a hero with face blindness, though. “Do you expect me to talk, Goldfinger?” “No, Mr. Bond. I expect to give you prosopagnosia.” Given the complete lack of payoff to Oberhauser’s promises about the effects of his drilling into Bond’s head, you can probably cue a slew of conspiracy theories that Bond never made it out of the chair and the whole third act was all a hallucination — you can imagine a sort of <i>Brazil</i>-like post-credit scene with Bond humming the theme distractedly to himself: "Dum de de dum dum", "I think we've lost him, Madeleine...". In which case our never seeing Craig’s Bond again would make a certain morbid sense.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">26 </span>There’s a definite sense that this is it, everyone pack up and go home — we’re done. It’s the closest Bond’s ever got to riding off into the sunset. Q’s final line, “I thought you’d gone”, is a lovely grace-note. <br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">27 </span>As indifferent as this film is overall, it feels so conclusive it would almost be a shame for Craig to do another — especially if he really hates playing the role as much as it seems.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">28 </span>That square in Mexico, packed with thousands of panicking festival-goers, the helicopter brawl overhead threatening to spill out into open air: Slash Film were write when in a recent podcast on the new <i>Mission: Impossible</i> they said the Bond film’s occasionally suffered from putting their best set-piece out front. Also, the film definitely squanders the eponymous organization that Sony fought to hard to reclaim the rights to. <i>Spectre i</i>s essentially just Quantum re-branded, a generic if threatening criminal UN. Still, that wasn’t all that came with the package…<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">29</span> Bond interrogating a rat is a cute moment of self-awareness about the absurdity of all this. The fact the rat’s hole leads him to a secret room is ludicrously Scooby Doo.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">30</span> Sony might not even have the rights for much longer: they’ve held onto them since the new <i>Casino Royale</i>, but their deal with MGM expires this year.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">31</span> Even if, yes, they can be a bit hit and miss.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">32</span> At 43, Idris Elba is sadly too old to really be taking on the commitment and, much as I love a fellow ginger, Damian Lewis is even older. Hardy is gruff and buff, but he can definitely pull off suave — plus he and Nolan already worked together on <i>Inception</i>. Failing that, maybe we'll finally get the Tarantino version we've all kinda sorta been waiting for.<br />
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Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-14490632458186767152015-10-18T16:06:00.001-07:002015-10-23T17:27:12.029-07:00CRIMSON PEAK<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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With <i>Crimson Peak</i> beloved horror director Guillermo Del Toro sets about creating another period ghost story, one that takes its cues more from classic Gothic melodrama.<span style="font-size: x-small;">1</span><br />
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The film follows Edith (Mia Wasikowska), the bookish only child<span style="font-size: x-small;">2</span> of self-made New York industrialist Carter Cushing (Jim Beaver).<span style="font-size: x-small;">3 </span>When Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), a Baronet, arrives from England, Edith is quick to write him off, sight unseen, as a Bourgeois parasite. When the two do meet, however, she finds herself charmed by the dashing, Byronic figure and things quickly go the way of Daphne Du Maurier’s <i>Rebecca</i>.<span style="font-size: x-small;">4</span><br />
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Their fairy-tale romance, however, is impinged upon by a sudden and brutal tragedy<span style="font-size: x-small;">5</span>, and Edith solemnly returns with Thomas to his ancestral home, the foreboding Allerdale Hall. A vast, decaying pile with battered turrets stretching towards the skies and red clay oozing up from the earth below, a definite fixer-upper to which the Sharpes — Thomas and his pale, suspicious sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain) — seem preternaturally attached.<span style="font-size: x-small;">6</span><br />
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While Thomas struggles to devise and build the machinery that will allow him to mine the clay and restore family’s squandered fortune, and Lucille drifts around the hall in high-collared black dresses like some tea-obsessed Big Bad Wolf, Edith finds herself the focus of a terrifying red-boned apparition.<span style="font-size: x-small;">7 </span>Edith, it seems, is sensitive to certain forces in a way that the close-knit Sharpes are not,<span style="font-size: x-small;">8 </span>and she soon finds herself investigating the secrets of so-called Crimson Peak<span style="font-size: x-small;">9</span>.<br />
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With its baroque furnishings and dingy William Morris wallpaper<span style="font-size: x-small;">10</span>, the house, like its inhabitants, is all about the silken interplay between light and shadow.<span style="font-size: x-small;">11</span> All the familiar touches are there — the portrait of the stern, long-deceased matriarch, the atmospheric iris wipes, and the moans and groans of ancient fireplaces —but the film’s sumptuous squalor transcends these genre trappings with a twisty-turny finale with just a touch of Kubrick .<span style="font-size: x-small;">12 </span><br />
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Offering a tale of phantasmagoric thrills and chills, <i>Crimson Peak</i> shows that, in an exploration of love and madness, style can sometimes become substance.<br />
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<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<i>Crimson Peak</i> gets a 7 out of 10</h3>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />1</span> His previous work of course including <i>The Devil’s Backbone</i> and <i>Pan’s Labyrinth</i>, both of which are set in and around the Spanish Civil War.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">2 </span>As an aspiring writer, she claims to prefer Mary Shelley to Jane Austen, though Hiddleston is definitely more in the Mr. Rochester mold.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">3 </span>Beaver has a history of playing benign, if surly, prospectors (see: <i>Deadwood</i>). <br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">4</span> Not least in that Lucille, as the black-clad keeper of the keys, bears a striking resemblance to the <br />
sinister housekeeper Mrs. Danvers. <br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">5 </span>A particularly gory tragedy involving a shattered skull and lacerated scalp, lovingly rendered by some of the same team behind Del Toro’s <i>The Strain</i>.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">6 </span>The central turret over the main lobby is caved in, allowing in a steady stream of leaves or snow, depending on the season and/or required mood.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">7</span> An apparition apparently portrayed by none other than long-time Del Toro collaborator Douglas Jones (The Pale Man in <i>Pan’s Labyrinth</i>, Abe Sapien in <i>Hellboy</i>).<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">8 </span>According to a theory laid out by Conan Doyle enthusiast Doctor McMichael (Charlie Hunnam) through the now debunked medium of spirit photography.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">9</span> The means of their conveyance — via prerecorded wax cylinder — are somewhat convenient, but<br />
a necessary evil of storytelling.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">10</span> Edith’s costumes grow increasingly pale and diaphanous as she herself communes with the dead. Her Goldilocks hair reinforces her as a symbol of purity.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">11 </span>Her bedroom has these strange inverted cupolas on the ceiling, as in the ’99 remake of <i>The Haunting</i>, though in this case the architecture leaves the menacing up to the spooks.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">12 </span>Fernando Velazquez’s score, meanwhile, is most effective when at its most minimal, like a single off-key piano note reverberating through dark hallways.</div>
Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-50763976964356717872015-10-18T12:52:00.002-07:002015-10-18T12:58:04.822-07:00THE BEST OF THE 2015 BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>I've just finished a write-up of the London Film Festival with my friend Rob Daniel of Electric Shadows, but Blogger, the site on which this is hosted, is being resolutely uncooperative about formatting. As such, I'll have to make do with posting a link.</i><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.electric-shadows.com/the-best-films-of-the-2015-bfi-london-film-festival/">http://www.electric-shadows.com/the-best-films-of-the-2015-bfi-london-film-festival/</a><i> </i></div>
Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3321402974211082988.post-67768633411363399772015-10-18T12:06:00.002-07:002015-10-18T12:47:21.668-07:00AN A-Z OF THE 2015 BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Apologies for not posting more often of late. I've been covering the London Film Festival for The Metropolist and it's subsumed more or less my every waking hour.</i><br />
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<i>With that in mind, here's a rundown of all 26 films I was able to see over the course of the Festival.</i><br />
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<i>Enjoy!</i><br />
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<b><span class="st">#</span></b> <br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-11-minutes/" target="_blank">11 Minutes</a><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-11-minutes/" target="_blank"> </a><br />
<b>A</b><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-assassination/" target="_blank">Assassination</a><br />
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<b>B</b><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-black-mass/" target="_blank">Black Mass</a><b> </b> <br />
<br />
<b>C</b><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-carol/" target="_blank">Carol</a> <br />
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<b>D</b><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-desierto/" target="_blank">Desierto</a><b> </b><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-dont-grow/" target="_blank">Don't Grow Up</a><br />
<br />
<b>G</b><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-green-room/" target="_blank">Green Room</a><b> </b><br />
<br />
<b>H</b><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-high-rise/" target="_blank">High Rise<b> </b></a> <br />
<br />
<b>J</b><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-james-white/" target="_blank">James White</a> <br />
<br />
<b>L</b><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-lady-van/" target="_blank">The Lady in the Van</a><b><a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-lady-van/" target="_blank"> </a></b><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-listen-marlon/" target="_blank">Listen To Me Marlon</a><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-lobster/" target="_blank">The Lobster</a><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-love-peace/" target="_blank">Love & Peace</a> <br />
<br />
<b>O</b><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-office/" target="_blank">Office</a><br />
<br />
<b>Q</b><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-quay-brothers-35mm/" target="_blank">The Quay Brothers in 35MM</a> <b> </b> <br />
<br />
<b>R</b><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-remainder/" target="_blank">Remainder</a><br />
<div class="entry-title" style="text-align: left;">
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/latest-film/review-ryuzo-seven-henchmen/" target="_blank">Ryūzō and His Seven Henchmen</a></div>
<br />
<b>S</b><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-son-saul/" target="_blank">Son of Saul</a><b> </b><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-steve-jobs/" target="_blank">Steve Jobs</a><b><a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-steve-jobs/" target="_blank"> </a></b><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-suffragette/" target="_blank">Suffragette</a><br />
<br />
<b>T</b><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-trumbo/" target="_blank">Trumbo</a><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-truth/" target="_blank">Truth</a><br />
<br />
<b>V </b><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-victoria-2/" target="_blank">Victoria</a><br />
<br />
<b>W</b><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-wave-2015/" target="_blank">The Wave (2015)</a> <br />
<br />
<b>Y</b><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-yakuza-apocalypse/" target="_blank">Yakuza Apocalypse</a><b><a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-yakuza-apocalypse/" target="_blank"> </a></b><br />
<a href="http://www.themetropolist.com/film/reviews/review-youth/" target="_blank">Youth</a></div>
Rob W.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17370869856131518961noreply@blogger.com0