Author Archives: The Red Dragon

Whiteout  (2009)    0/100

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Rating :   0/100             COMPLETE INCINERATION            101 Min        15

This is one of those rare films that has left The Red Dragon genuinely quite sad at the couple of hours of life wasted watching it. Normally, even if a film is bad, I may not necessarily regret having given it a go, but here there really is nothing good to say about the film whatsoever, it’s just a solid block of endless shit. Kate Beckinsale stars as the law official at an Antarctic outpost who must solve the mystery of bodies turning up in the snow, despite being so poor with her firearm she might as well be wielding a banana, all occurring a couple of days before she was due to leave for civilisation again. It’s primary sin is that the story is catatonically dull, but it soon degenerates from boring to gratingly daft, with Beckinsale at all times looking more like she’s just left a beauty parlour than been braving extreme arctic conditions. Whiteout itself deserves to be blotted out of history.

3 Days to Kill  (2014)    69/100

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Rating :   69/100                                                                     117 Min        12A

Kevin Costner stars as a CIA operative diagnosed with terminal brain and lung cancer and given three months to live, inducing him to visit his estranged wife and daughter in Paris to make amends before he kicks the bucket – enter sex on legs Amber Heard to throw a spanner in the works and offer him an experimental life extending drug, if he does just one more job for the agency that is …

It’s a lot more light hearted and fun than it sounds with numerous comedic moments, decent action and several beautifully iconic shots of Paris. In fact, it is exactly what you might expect from mixing writer Luc Besson (‘Leon’ 94, ‘The Fifth Element’ 97) with director McG (‘Charlie’s Angels’ 2000, ‘Terminator Salvation’ 09). It doesn’t start off too well, with the intro intelligence brief telling us about primary terrifying villains ‘The Wolf’, and, ‘The Albino’, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously, nor does it take long to settle either.

Costner brings his wealth of experience to ground the central role and he plays it in the same subtle and subdued way that he did in ‘Jack Ryan : Shadow Recruit‘, again playing a CIA operative there, and the support from the likes of Hailee Steinfeld as his daughter is equally good.  A return to form for many involved and a suitably likeable and entertaining weekend action film.

Jersey Boys  (2014)    59/100

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Rating :   59/100                                                                     134 Min        15

This is one film that’s tough to go the distance with, slicing fifty minutes out of the beginning would certainly improve matters as the first half is lacking in almost every department. It’s Clint Eastwood’s latest directorial effort (one of his older films makes a brief appearance, but he remains behind the camera this time around) and it’s based on the award winning musical of the same name which documents the rise to fame of sixties sensations Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, with John Lloyd Young as Valli and Vincent Piazza, Erich Bergen and Michael Lomenda playing band members Tommy DeVito, Bob Gaudio and Nick Massi respectively.

It’s really the same old story that seems to chart the progress of nearly every band and musician immortalised on film – humble beginnings, success, excess and then infighting that brings an end to the group. Initially, the cinematography and funeral march pace to the film cause huge problems – everyone and everything has a horrid eerie paleness that makes the people look more like spectres than live actors, but the singing and acting doesn’t really fit the bill either, with Valli at times about as vocally emotive as a dying squid. Eventually, as time passes in terms of years, more colour comes back in, or rather less is taken out, and when it comes to the larger numbers, everything is a little more polished and fluid. It suggests that a famous scene from Billy Wilder’s ‘Ace in the Hole’ (51) is responsible for one of their biggest hits ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’ (and it’s a really terrific film if you haven’t seen it, although if it’s the scene I think it is the clip here cuts off before the main event as it were). Unfortunately, despite picking up significantly, it never really proves terribly interesting, although it is at least partially successful in extolling the virtues of looking out for family and taking responsibility for one’s actions.

The Fault in Our Stars  (2014)    32/100

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Rating :   32/100                                                                     126 Min        12A

Well, the stars are indeed faulty in this terminal cancer themed drama, one hot on the heels of 2012’s ‘Now is Good’ and thematically almost identical, yet nowhere near as well done (this is based on the novel of the same name by John Green which was published in 2012, ‘Now is Good’ is based on the book ‘Before I Die’ by Jenny Downham which was published in 2007). I think there were no less than one million teenage girls bawling their eyes out through the final, massively drawn out over at least forty minutes, emotional act – all delivered in a maudlin and cheesy way on a pathos level with the Twilight saga. I don’t think I’ve witnessed such an event since ‘Titanic’ hit the big screen back in 1997, and The Red Dragon couldn’t quite suppress a smile of amusement at the spectacle.

It is painfully obvious how the entire film is going to play out from the opening five or ten minutes (and indeed the trailer), where we see terminal lung cancer patient Hazel (played very well by Shailene Woodley) enter a cancer support group for the first time where she will meet romantic interest and cancer survivor Gus (not played very well by Ansel Elgort), who’s ‘thing’ is that he likes to hang around with a fag loosely hanging out of his mouth. Hazel pulls him up on it, stating it’s a pretty disgusting thing to do given the scenario – then he explains he never lights it and it’s actually a metaphor, which was apparently the right thing to say to get her pants wet. YOU ARE STILL ADVERTISING CIGARETTES YOU INGRATE FUD, especially when we watch the fool showing it off in at least seven or eight scenes. Ridiculous.

Later on, during a life affirming trip to the Netherlands, things are not going so well for Hazel’s spirits courtesy of Willem Dafoe and so to cheer her up his rather comely secretary (Lotte Verbeek) decides to take them out for a while, to Anne Frank House. Because that’s the most uplifting place to visit in Amsterdam. Inside, they discover many, many flights of stairs (who knew? It’s not like she famously hid in the attic or anything. They also describe the bookcase there as being the actual one used to hide the entrance to the Achterhuis. It isn’t), presenting a fairly major problem for someone with lung cancer and a machine that she has to carry around with her everywhere, we then watch as she practically passes out and dies there and then on each flight, and yet those around her are fine to keep going to the very top. Once there, the lovers kiss and all the random tourists, who were not actually aware of the Edmund Hillary style effort to reach the summit, all give them a round of applause. I kind of doubt kissing is what tourists normally find themselves applauding when they visit Amsterdam.

Even her doctors, who raise objections to her trip, are hopelessly caricatured – shouting at her she’s JUST TOO SICK, rather than explaining anything to do with the physics of the flight and her condition. The character of Hazel is one of the few things that actually work in the film, mainly due to Woodley herself – her cohort not only suffers from the aforementioned character issues but Elgort also played Shailene Woodley’s brother in ‘Divergent‘ released only a couple of months ago, and certainly I don’t remember seeing him in anything before or after, thus creating a sense of THIS. FEELS. VERY. WRONG. Which further undermines the romance.

Ultimately, it’s a film designed to sell the double-hitter of idealised romance with its drawn out obliteration, combined with lots and lots of sad modern songs and music, to its intended audience, again conceptually similar to Titanic. Watch ‘Now is Good’ instead, it’s miles better.

Belle  (2013)    71/100

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Rating :   71/100                                                                     104 Min        12A

The trailer for this made it look a lot more melodramatic than it is, a shame as it’s a solid film with a strong political context and an actual historical trial as framework for its main protagonists to flit around. Although the court case was real and seminal for the law of England and Wales, taking place in 1783, very little is known about the main characters other than their existence and their familial setup, so director Amma Asante and writer Misan Sagay had a lot of leeway with where to take them and the two pictured above are most famous for a painting of the pair of them, which can currently be seen in Scone Palace in Scotland.

Belle (played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is the heroine of the piece, and as the daughter of a rich white man and a black slave she is raised by the family of the former whilst he goes off around the world never to return. She is accepted into the family, the rest of whom are played by Tom Wilkinson, Emily Watson, Penelope Wilton and Sarah Gadon, but she must always know ‘her place’ until her and her sister reach the age of coming out, when they must quickly be married before consumption gets them or they decide to go frolicking in the rain and then die, often the fate of females in British period dramas.

The pace is perfect, the costumes are rich and the locations suitably grandiose with burgeoning bosoms in abundance – did ladies really wear corsets to breakfast? Doesn’t seem particularly conducive to digestion, nor so for their male companions who must have found it tricky to concentrate on their food, especially with the visible threat of explosion and the potential loss of one’s eye. The trial of the deplorable Zong massacre, which forms the backbone of the story, concerned the drowning of all the slaves onboard the Zong and her captain’s subsequent insurance claim against loss of earnings through unavoidable jettison of cargo – his claim being low water supplies only sufficient for his crew necessitated the killings. This presented the law with a rather thorny moral and monetary point to consider, and the head of Belle’s household, Lord Mansfield, is the man who must make the ruling.

In terms of film, it supplies a nice backstory to that of the fight for the abolition of slavery in the UK detailed in ‘Amazing Grace’ (06), but it is dangerous to think of it as a relic of the past as it still rears its ugly head in modern day Britain with recent rulings against the government in the high court in England to try to curb it. This refers to the forcing of those out of work for a certain amount of time (it was originally to be one year, but reports abound of less time than this) into work, which in principle I’m not sure many people would argue against, but work that they weren’t paid for, instead they just continued to receive state benefits working out at two pound something an hour (the legal minimum wage for anyone over 21 is more than six pounds an hour) – often for large companies like Tesco (who did at least eventually pull out of the scheme on moral grounds) immediately demonstrating that they could have in fact offered the individual a paid position, but would rather take on slave labour. If people didn’t comply, they were left with nothing and, as far as the government were concerned, to die.

Orchestrating this were middle men, private agencies, modern day slavers who did the same thing in Australia before they came here, where I believe their schemes were eventually brought to an end. Meanwhile here the high court ruled it wasn’t slavery but that it had been delivered in an illegal manner, which was a cop-out for the state really, but it did mean those affected could claim money back for any welfare suspension borne from refusing to comply with the system – and it was an individual who stuck her neck out to fight the Conservative government and achieved partial victory (The Red Dragon himself broached this issue with no less than two parliamentarians, with what can only be described as very limited results, proving the old adage ‘If you want something done, you have to do it yourself’).

Belle then is both a fascinating footnote in this story of human bondage and a well balanced drama with good performances from old hands and new faces alike, and it would be a wonderful idea indeed if the powers that be took heed of the more emotive and full of gusto speeches it delivers, since they can’t even muster a whimper in opposition to evil today unless they consider it to be within the purview of their own interests.

Devil’s Knot  (2013)    64/100

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Rating :   64/100                                                                     114 Min        15

What is a thoroughly compelling story from start to finish is nevertheless constantly held back by ludicrous casting choices and major flaws from screenwriters Paul Harris Boardman and Scott Derrickson, and critically from director Atom Egoyan, preventing this from becoming surefire awards worthy material. It’s adapted from the 2002 novel of the same name by Mara Leveritt, which detailed the harrowing true story of the disappearance of three young boys in the small town of West Memphis, Arkansas, in the early nineties, and the ensuing criminal trial of three teenage suspects thought to have been involved.

The film on the one hand plays with the potential innocence of the accused, but on the other we are shown right at the beginning an event taking place just after the kids go missing involving a man going into a restaurant and arousing suspicion, then legging it before the police arrive. It couldn’t be more heavily suggested he is involved, and yet no further mention of it is made until much farther into the movie, undermining everything in-between because we know of its existence and continually ask ourselves ‘why is nobody talking about this pretty major smoking gun event that the police are aware of?’. There are other major developments in terms of the evidence that feel like they aren’t being dramatised to the degree they should be, and in fact they get little more than some sighs of surprise in the courtroom, and a number of casting choices which immediately point suspicion due to their respective back catalogue of roles all continues to undermine the unfolding plot. Indeed, there are basic forensic questions which are never touched upon in the film and yet they absolutely must have been in the actual trial.

Even some of the characters seem dubious – Colin Firth plays an investigator who offers his services pro bono out of a sense of safeguarding justice, with the accused potentially facing the death penalty, and we see him constantly eyeing Reese Witherspoon (who plays the mother of one of the missing children). We assume that there is some connection there which will come to light later on but it turns out there isn’t one, he simply feels a lot of empathy for her. That kind of sums up the whole film – all of the right ingredients just orchestrated together poorly.

The performances themselves are all fine, though possibly Firth is stretching the most here, with an American accent which is good but quietens further his already quite reserved voice. Once upon a time a law student friend of mine took me to the public gallery in court for an afternoon’s excursion, which I have to fully recommend to anyone who has never been as it is utterly fascinating to watch the process of real trials unfolding, but I’ll never forget one poor woman who was taken into the court in cuffs and within a matter of minutes the judge had ascertained that the police hadn’t in reality secured a single piece of evidence against her and, understandably unhappy about this, she demanded that the accused be immediately released after having been in custody for a period of some weeks awaiting the hearing. I simply couldn’t believe that in this day and age something like that could happen, and along these lines films like this are very important because they highlight not only the effects of serious crime, but also the fallibility of officers who may care more about getting ‘a result’ than unearthing the truth of the matter at hand (if you ever have any dealings with the police ALWAYS make sure you exercise your right to have a lawyer present).

A courtroom drama that could, and should, have been much more intricate still remains compulsive viewing, and a story that will stay with you for a very long time.

The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet  (2013)    49/100

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Rating :   49/100                                                                     105 Min        PG

Dull as ditch water and with moments that will have you thinking ‘did they actually just do that?’ – in concern rather than amazement. Director and auteur Jean-Pierre Jeunet created one of the most loved films of the century so far with ‘Amelie’ in 2001 but the rest of his work, some of it nevertheless very well regarded, has had a tendency to focus on quirkiness rather than story, with elaborate and fanciful props, costumes and characters. No surprise then that Helena Bonham Carter, who has effectively fashioned a career out of doing exactly the same thing, has found her way into one of his films in this, a rare English language departure from his usual French productions (the only other is 1997’s ‘Alien Resurrection’).

The story revolves around the adventures of a young boy of ten, the titular T.S. Spivet (played by Kyle Catlett), who deals with his feelings of guilt over the accidental death of his brother and the lack of acceptance from his family regarding his scientific endeavours by running away from his home in Montana and heading for Washington D.C., having created an operational perpetual motion device and received invitation to give a speech at the Smithsonian, although they are unaware of his age. It’s based on American author Reif Larsen’s debut novel ‘The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet’, and despite the serious nature of the plot it’s delivered to us in a fairly light hearted and whimsical way, trying to evoke the youthful spirit of invention and adventure that Spivet is imbued with. At it’s core though, there is a fluctuating chasm of moral ambiguity as we don’t really see or feel the consequences for his family after he leaves – and they are shown to be relatively loving, decent parents. Similarly, on his journey he hitch-hikes with a trucker who remarks that a couple of Spivet’s ribs are probably broken, but rather than do anything about it he just drives on and takes his photo, which he explains he does with everyone – queue shot of a series of creepy photos with various female passengers and even one with him showing off holding a rifle at the head of what we assume is a Taliban prisoner from his tour of duty in the Middle East.

The way it has been filmed continues this uneasy feeling – we see a goat with barbed wire attached to a fence and looped around its neck and Spivet and his father attempting to free it. Presumably, it isn’t barbed wire that was used, and yet whatever the material actually was how can you film it in that way whilst guaranteeing the animal isn’t going to be hurt? Later on we see a dog apparently being visibly made to chew on an iron bucket, and the same dog being forced fed, by Spivet, something it doesn’t want to eat (the camera cuts off before anything is actually ingested), but the worst is reserved for the humans on set as we watch Spivet hiding under a train when it begins to move, and then he crawls out between the wheels whilst it’s actually in motion. Now, surely this must have been done with camera trickery (if it wasn’t then Jeunet deserves to be in jail frankly) but it certainly looks pretty real, and what wasn’t faked is a stunt later on that sees the youngster take a leap and make a fairly painful looking grab for his intended target (thus the broken ribs). Catlett had a stunt double, but taking all these things together if Jeunet can’t make an adventure film without having it appear he’s putting animals and children in actual harm’s way then he really shouldn’t be operating behind the camera in any capacity, let alone directing big budget films.

Despite all of this, the film’s largest drawback is simply that it drags on with nothing particularly interesting really happening. Catlett is fine in the role, but struggles when the larger emotional moments are called for, and the visuals of some of the countryside are wonderful, but they can’t atone for a lacking and morally uncertain central story.

Oculus  (2013)    61/100

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Rating :   61/100                                                                     104 Min        PG

Horror film featuring the supposed shenanigans of an EVIL MIRROR THAT CAN CONTROL MINDS, in this case the minds of Kaylie (Karen Gillan) and Tim (Brenton Thwaites) the surviving members of the Russell family, their parents having been brutalised in front of them when they were kids. Now in their early twenties, Tim is released from psychiatric care (where he has been ever since mirrorgate), convinced that his mind used the irrational to rationalised horrible instances of domestic violence – his sister’s first response to him being released is to cajole him into turning up at their old home again to immediately confront the mirror and try to tease out the evil within so she can record it and prove their parents weren’t completely mental. This will severely test the effectiveness of Tim’s therapy sessions, as well as his love for his older sister, who has effectively toughed it out by herself through the foster care system, intent on a danger fraught reckoning with the old heirloom of Balmoral castle (a nod, no doubt, to Gillan being Scottish but also an opportunity missed with no mention or link to any of the Royal Family that stayed there).

Gillan sports an understated and entirely convincing American accent and is herself the strongest element in the film, with Thwaites having the difficult, hackneyed and irritating role of conveying the ‘I don’t believe any of this’ trope across to the audience. Throughout the entire movie we have a dual narrative – what’s happening with the two main characters in the present, spliced with showing us what happened to them and their parents when they were kids and here the biggest difficulty arises, as one not only detracts from the other but they both eventually become deliberately intertwined, which is a pretty ambitious strategy and, well, the film doesn’t really pull it off. There are lots of silly moments, like Kaylie earnestly saying ‘OK, from now on we’ll stick together’ and then hotfooting it right out the door and leaving her brother to stare into space in growing stupefaction (he does this a lot). The enemy they are ostensibly up against seems too powerful as well, with the pair unable to tell what is real and what isn’t, especially when Kaylie has prepared the scenario already armed with this knowledge.

Despite never really hooking the audience it does have its moments, and it’s still better than the majority of horror films churned out nowadays because it at least attempts to have a story, even if that story does, at times, become a convoluted mess.

Grace of Monaco  (2014)    57/100

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Rating :   57/100                                                                     103 Min        PG

Universally panned by critics and booed by the Cannes audience that were, ahem, graced with its world premier. Despite ostensibly being about the life of Grace Kelly, one of the biggest movie stars of all time – who married Prince Rainier III of Monaco in 1956 to become Grace, Princess of Monaco, this is really just a short, albeit eventful, chapter of her life and centers around the politically charged cauldron of intrigue that the principality found itself in with Charles de Gaulle of France, who threatened to extinguish the nation’s sovereignty if he did not get his way (according to the film at any rate). Likely, this political context strongly influenced the negative reaction in Cannes, a mere 42km or so down the French Riviera from Monaco.

It is interesting – detailing an event in history that was certainly new to me, and indeed presenting one of those moments when you think to yourself, ‘how come I’ve never heard about this before?’. Well, part of the reason for this is that huge swathes of its ‘history’ are fabrications. The personal goings on are of course speculation and invention, with a few events which did occur but a decade earlier than shown, in fact the Royal Family of Monaco have suggested people simply obliterate the lot of it in a press release about the movie, but whilst artistic license with unknown material is to be expected the liberties taken with the facts are simply too egregious to be ignored – like showing de Gaulle being politically outmanoeuvred by Grace by her contriving to have him show up for an event that he never in reality actually attended, and portraying the French as almost pantomime bad guys in order to have the audience sympathise with the protagonists without properly explaining the debate at hand. It’s a shame, Tim Roth as Rainier and Nicole Kidman as Kelly are good to watch, the story flows fairly naturally with the idolisation of the central heroine feeling appropriate rather than gratuitous, although director Olivier Dahan certainly stumbles and falls on more than one occasion.

An effort has been made to mimic to a degree the cinematography of the films Kelly herself starred in – even using obvious studio screens for the backgrounds as Kidman drives around the winding precipitous upland roads of Monaco. Indeed, there is a nod in the direction of what oddly stands out as one of the most memorable scenes in ‘To Catch a Thief’ (55) as we watch Hitchcock (played by Roger Ashton-Griffiths) being driven up to a cliff edge overlooking the whole of the city and, by extension, the entire nation – in the movie Cary Grant and Grace Kelly drive up to the same spot and it’s memorable for both the view and the moment, but it’s also very obvious this scene takes place within a studio and then suddenly, when Grant gets out of the car and walks to the boot, it cuts to location footage with, presumably, body doubles, before once again cutting back to the studio when he gets back into the car. It’s good to know even one of the world’s most famous and revered filmmakers wasn’t afraid to fudge it when he had to …

The film also fits in nicely to this era in the life of Hitchcock and the stories told in both ‘Hitchcock‘ and ‘The Girl‘, in fact chronologically this should be watched in between the two if you intend to see all three. The ending continues to cause problems – the very end bizarrely feels more like that of ‘The Return of the King’ (03), but during a climatic speech from Princess Grace the camera zooms in way, way too much on her face. We can see globules of mascara collecting, the scar from Nicole Kidman’s nose job and the insides of her nostrils in high definition, her bloodshot eyes focused by collecting tears – it’s about as far removed from a classical edit as you can get and it does detract from the moment but, having said that, it does make even the very glamorous and beautiful Nicole Kidman herself look, well, the very opposite of that – perhaps it was an attempt at vulnerability, and to humanise the glamour? Perhaps …

With Frank Langella, Parker Posey and Derek Jacobi in support.

22 Jump Street  (2014)    66/100

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Rating :   66/100                                                                     112 Min        15

The sequel to 2012’s action comedy ’21 Jump Street’ (itself based on the late 80’s/early 90’s TV show, which helped launch the career of a certain Mr. Johnny Depp), again starring Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill and with plenty of in-jokes alluding to their increased budget this time around and the similar story – with the two cops returning undercover but graduating, figuratively, from impersonating high school students to becoming roommates in college. The returning central plot element is a new drug craze which has claimed at least one life on campus, and which of course allows the protagonists to accidentally try some for themselves.

Hill actually came up with the story, together with Michael Bacall (who has reportedly finished his script for the spin-off ‘Tropic Thunder’ film that is to centre on Tom Cruise’s scene stealing cameo character Les Grossman) and it is entertaining enough, with similar gags and action to the first one, though what it somehow manages to do quite well is play on the bromance between the leads, as one gets jealous of the other’s new college friends/social status and must deal with a resurgence of his feelings of isolation, and an ongoing lover’s quarrel ensues. Altogether, a slight improvement on its predecessor.