Tag Archives: 2012

The Iceman  (2012)    72/100

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Rating :   72/100                                                                     105 Min        15

Michael Shannon stars as real life New Jersey hitman Richard Kuklinski, who reputedly snuffed out over one hundred people in his long running career, in this violent tale of one man’s rage fuelled impulses and his conjoined determination to protect his family, together with his need to keep his underworld business with the Mafia a secret from them as a necessary part of that protection. Shannon is fantastic in the role, and Ray Liotta is just as good as the gangster that ‘funds’ his murderous enterprise, although this is hardly surprising since Liotta is pretty much the professional gangster of the big screen, someone should really make ‘Shoot Them One More Time Just to Make Sure’, the Disney musical biography of Ray Liotta’s onscreen career.

Winona Ryder plays Kuklinski’s somewhat faithfully naïve wife, whilst Chris Evans, Captain America himself, turns up as a rival assassin, and David Schwimmer convinces us he’s not Ross from ‘Friends’ this time round. Bizarrely, there is a court room scene at one point that seems to have mostly CGI members of the public sitting in the gallery. It’s a little odd, but otherwise this is a noteworthy gangster film sold primarily on the back of Shannon’s ability to embody the relentless killer that Kuklinski is, whilst also gaining our sympathy for him and his family.

The age certificate screen that appears before the film proper describes it as rated 15 for strong violence, sex and bad language, but I fail to see how graphic images of people having their throats sliced open doesn’t qualify it to be an 18 – neither is the sex especially strong (which is a shame since Winona Ryder is in it). It reminds me of when the computer game ‘Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’, which was rated 18, was pulled from shelves not because you could run around chainsawing old grannies in the street and then rob and kick their corpses, but because a mod version was found to exist whereby once you’d shacked up with whichever one of your lady friends you’d impressed by doing all manner of pointless things, and the screen switched to an outside view of the house whilst you went in for some ‘hot coffee’, you were now able to view the actual act of, ahem, procreation, and could perform different sexual manipulations with the control pad. The game was made in Edinburgh, by Rockstar North, I’m proud to say, but the absurdity of the ban highlighted a bigger problem with censorship in general. Likewise, this should have been an 18, but the lack of genital shots rather than brutal executions are what prevent it from being so. Naturally.

Populaire  (2012)    66/100

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Rating :   66/100                                                                     111 Min        12A

A fairly decent French language film set in the late 1950’s that very much apes the feel of Audrey Hepburn’s ‘Funny Face’ (57) but which isn’t quite as enjoyable as that classic musical number, in fact it’s almost too light and fluffy for its own good, but with a warm heart that ultimately just wins out over predictability and comedy that never really does more than tickle lightly. It stars Romain Duris as insurance salesman Louis Échard looking for a new secretary – enter Déborah François as the young and very beautiful small town ingenue Rose Pamphyle who will fill the position after demonstrating excessively rapid typing skills, to the extent that Louis feels compelled to enter her into regional speed typing tournaments, and to train her to realise her full typewriting championship potential.

It’s immediately obvious that a romance can hardly fail to develop, and Duris’ character fills the boots of the ‘douche bag guy who will inevitably come good in the end’, but whilst Duris’ performance nor his character are particularly convincing, Déborah François is what really sells the picture, giving a strong and very affable portrayal of the clumsy and yet determined Rose, and surprisingly the fairly dull sounding competition of speed typing becomes reasonably interesting – they even manage to fit in a ‘Rocky’ style training montage at one point.

Bérénice Bejo plays a supporting character that aids in no small way the budding romance, but also teaches Rose to play piano – ostensibly to aid her digital adroitness, but also nodding to the most famous roles of both lead actors to date; ‘The Page Turner’ (06) for François, and ‘The Beat that my Heart Skipped’ (05) for Duris, in which he also played an angry twat who somehow gets the girl by shouting at her in a fit of rage at one point, if memory serves. Indeed, in one scene here Rose gives him a good slap, and he’s just as quick to give her a good one right back – it’s very French, but also perhaps another nod to a moment in ‘Funny Face’ with a Parisian couple sitting outside a nightclub, the female member of which is angrily shouting at her male partner, who, naturally, slaps her across the face, and she promptly responds by hugging and kissing him passionately. ‘Populaire’ takes its name from the brand of typewriter Rose uses, and marks the feature film debut of Régis Roinsard.

Byzantium  (2012)    52/100

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Rating :   52/100                                                                     118 Min        15

Easily the two best things in this film are Gemma Arterton’s breasts jumping gallantly around for most of the film, occasionally winking out of their hopeful constraints toward us like two giant, mischievous mountains, whilst lesser beings gravitate around them and, as soon as they prove to be no visual challenge to Arterton’s alluring curves, are promptly killed. This is because the lady in question plays a vampire, Clara, quite fully endowed to helm the film solo she is nevertheless enjoined by her moody vampire daughter Eleanor, played by Saoirse Ronan. The two both began as human and despite both being around two hundred years old, Eleanor picks this particular moment to enter her teenage rebellious phase, queue lots of staring meaningfully into the distance, capriciousness and melancholy pangs of no one else understanding her, and pops at her mother’s guardianship and choice of vocation.

This is one of the many faults of the film, but the list is rather a long one. Said mother’s vocation, for example, is harlotry. Now, given we’re told they never forget anything and have been around for two centuries it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to consider she could have come up with something better to do than offer shaft maintenance at fifty pounds a go. In fact, since we also find out her and her daughter, who does not turn tricks incidentally (at least, not so far as we are aware), are the only female vampires in existence, she must effectively be the best prostitute the world has ever known. I mean, her pelvic floor muscles must be so damn powerful that she can prevent ejaculation at all times, maintain erections indefinitely, and she’s immune to disease. Together with her eternal beauty, she should be sleeping with world premiers not moaning and mumping about how she’s so hard up and she’s simply doing what she can to support her family, as if she’s some washed up dockland missy with broken teeth, whose closest friends are crawling around in her undergarments. She blatantly enjoys what she does, why can’t the writer (Moira Buffini, based on her play) just be honest with her characters?

Eleanor promptly finds a young male to chow over teenage angst ridden romance with, and naturally she is torn by whether or not she should tell him she’s dead, although she’s already decided she will of course, she just wants to dramatise the wait as much as possible, and frankly the male character she chooses is way creepier than any of the vampires are. As the only female vamps, they are being pursued by some of the ruling male hierarchy who wish to ‘have words’ with them. Among their number is Sam Riley playing Darvell, and he is pretty convincing in the role, until he starts to do his gravelly voice thing that he used to such bad effect in ‘On the Road’. For goodness sake, you are a vampire, your character does not need to pretend to be hard.

A vampire film daring to be released into the saturated market nowadays really has to have something original and compelling about it – this doesn’t. It doesn’t make any sense, the characters are unreal in more ways than one, I sort of got into the back story that’s told throughout the film but even that is done in a very awkward and disjointed manner. Indeed, with Ronan’s character there are shades of her last release, ‘The Host’, and the final film is just as lackluster – a major disappointment from director Neil Jordan, amongst whose past credits lies the very fine indeed ‘Interview with the Vampire’ (94). Incidentally, the title comes primarily from the name of the guest house Clara sets up business in, though there is a brief reference to the city – Byzantium was of course the precursor of what would later become Constantinople, and then, later still, Istanbul in modern day Turkey.

Mud  (2012)    74/100

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Rating :   74/100                                                                     130 Min        12A

The latest in a series of recent films to feature a standout performance from Matthew McConaughey, who has decided to ditch his, much given to ribaldry, roles of ‘the guy who takes his shirt off’, romcom castaways most cinema goers will be familiar with prior to his taking on much more interesting and, as is the case here in his interpretation of the eponymous Mud, more vulnerable character portraits, although getting his shirt off is still knowingly fitted into the storyline, female viewers fret not. All this is a little misleading though – he is one of three main characters, the other two being a couple of friends in their early teens who happen upon Mud hiding out in the woods around their small town in Arkansas, as the first half of the film plays out like a cross between ‘Winter’s Bone’ and ‘Badlands’, meandering into the domain of Mark Twain along the Mississippi river.

The boys are played by Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland whom, together with a supporting cast that includes Reese Witherspoon, Sam Shepard and Michael Shannon, also bring their characters to life with suitable distinction. Indeed, initially everything unfolds at a painfully reticent rate, but slowly we warm to the central trio, and gradually their lives become more interesting, ultimately leading to a worthwhile, poignant and memorable drama about the incisive and defining pain of falling in love, no matter what age you are when it happens. The film is written and directed by Jeff Nichols, hot on the success of his 2011 indie hit ‘Take Shelter’, also starring Michael Shannon.

McConaughey’s performance, and the film in general, received a lot of buzz in Hollywood when it was released, and it stands as another early awards contender, and it would not be particularly surprising or amiss to see him take home a prestigious award based on the sheer number alone of his recently lauded performances. For any fans of his, McConaughey’s other noteworthy roles of late have been; ‘Magic Mike’ (2012), ‘The Paperboy’ (2012), ‘Killer Joe’ (2011), ‘Bernie’ (2011) and ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ (2011). Indeed, John Grisham has recently announced he’s working on a sequel to ‘A Time to Kill’, whose film adaptation was previously one of McConaughey’s finest moments – is this sequel inspired by a resurgence in the actor’s career?

Quite Possibly …

The Reluctant Fundamentalist  (2012)    56/100

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Rating :   56/100                                                                     130 Min        15

A fairly basic story told via characters that don’t really engage our sympathy or a great deal of our interest, but it at least flirts with the point it’s trying to make. Based on the similarly titled and highly acclaimed novel (so much so, many universities give it as a welcoming present to new undergrads) by Mohsin Hamid, the story follows that of Changez (Urdu for Genghis, pronounced Chungez) as he is being interviewed in Pakistan by an American journalist (Liev Schreiber) over whether or not he has anything to do with the kidnapping of a local American academic, and by extension, may be the fundamentalist in the title. We go on a journey through his past via the tale he tells in the interview, seeing him move to America as a young man from his native Pakistan for academic pursuits, and finding eventual financial success within the ranks of an internationally recognised company, and then being stigmatised and threatened in the aftermath of 9/11 based upon the colour of his skin.

However, the high paid job he has sees him analyse companies’ productivity, looking for ways to make improvements which invariably involves making life worse for the assembly line staff, which Changez does with ruthless aplomb, and so it becomes a little difficult to feel any real sympathy for him when, for instance, he is harangued by security officials who suspect he may be a terrorist, especially when he seems to be released the same day with no charges having been made or repercussions of any kind. He grows a beard out of what we assume to be spite, a deliberate attempt to do something which in theory he has every right too, but in reality he lets it grow so scruffy that the majority of companies that deal with the public are going to take issue with it, regardless of ethnicity. The relationship with his girlfriend, played by Kate Hudson, is also used to accentuate the unfair tension he begins to feel everywhere in his New York life, and comes to constitute another element in his general crisis of faith, but really everything about her character and their relationship feels loosely defined at best, with highs that don’t even register and lows that potter around the realms of lackadaisical whimsy.

Riz Ahmed (‘Four Lions’, ‘iLL Manors’) plays Changez, and he does quite a good job, although nothing about his portrayal is particularly enlivening. He also narrated the book for BBC Radio 4, quite possibly what brought him to the attention of acclaimed Indian director Mira Nair (‘Monsoon Wedding’, ‘Salaam Bombay’) for this adaptation. The film hints at the sort of cycle of violence that might send someone down the road to fundamentalism, but really for the most part what we see is a young man going through some relatively undramatic problems with regards to alienation and relationships, and frankly if he were such a bastard in the first place, turfing thousands of working class people out of jobs (something which historically does lead to extremism), then I seriously doubt he would let having to endure a little anal probing at the airport and a slight rebuke from his father stand in the way of his making more inordinate amounts of money in the lucrative career that is displayed as his for the taking. There is also a lot of mention of CIA involvement in Pakistan, but details are never discussed, adding to the strains of conceit that echo throughout the entirety of the film.

Love is All You Need / Den Skaldede Frisør  (2012)    67/100

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Rating :   67/100                                                                     116 Min        15

From acclaimed Danish director Susanne Bier and starring Pierce Brosnan and Trine Dyrholm, this is a very traditional tale about hardship and the redemption of finding rejuvenating love in the most unlikely of places. Brosnan’s son is marrying Dyrholm’s daughter in Italy, and the two of them meet when their cars collide accidentally in the Danish airport they are to depart from. One has an adulterous husband and lives with the threat of returning cancer (he cheated on her whilst she was undergoing chemotherapy no less), the other lost his wife many years ago in a tragic road accident and has allowed himself to be consumed by work ever since. Both central performances are extremely good, and indeed the pain in Brosnan’s eyes looks very real when he talks about the loss of his wife, so much so Red Dragon decided to do a little checking and sure enough, he sadly lost his first wife, actress Cassandra Harris, to cancer. Ever since he has been a vocal supporter of cancer charities (he is also an ardent environmentalist), including being the celebrity spokesman one year for the breast cancer fundraiser ‘Lee National Denim Day’, run by Lee Jeans and which reputedly raises more funds than any other annual one day event for the cause – you can find more details about it here. Interestingly, Cassandra Harris appeared in the Bond film ‘For Your Eyes Only’ (81) as Lisl, and visiting her onset Brosnan was introduced to Bond producer Albert R. Broccoli which, despite setbacks due to his ‘Remington Steele’ contract that allowed Timothy Dalton to take the reins for two films, eventually led to his casting as the fifth actor to play James Bond in the Eon series.

Despite the likeability of the central characters, it’s the supporting roles that drag this film into the realm of melodrama, and although it’s not insufferable, it does begin to fray the edges of its believability, with almost everyone else at the wedding having some sort of personal drama which will come to the fore, and which ultimately takes up too much screen time and detracts from the core of the film. The Mediterranean setting is picturesque, evoking Brosnan’s vocally challenged trip to Greece in ‘Mamma Mia’ (08), and there are a lot of beautiful landscape shots of the town they go to, indeed it would not have gone amiss to have cut them longer and extracted some of the soap opera to make room. Brosnan exists here as box office draw, but one cannot imagine this going down too well in Denmark as although his character is deemed to be fluent in Danish, the actor is most certainly not, and so the film constantly flits between English and subtitled Danish, purely to try and appeal to a wider market. A tactical ploy which appears to have been successful, with this screened more commercially than most of Bier’s previous work, although I wonder if something did not go awry with their marketing, as the only time I’ve seen a trailer play for this was a mere one day before it went on national release, and, equally, I wonder if a wider release would not have been secured anyway, given the success of her previous film ‘In a Better World’ (10), which took home the best foreign language film award from the Oscars (notably, against the wonderful ‘Dogtooth’).

A nice film worthy of a look in, even if the supporting story arcs hinder rather than help.

The Place Beyond the Pines  (2012)    76/100

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Rating :   76/100                                                                     140 Min        15

The third dramatic feature from ‘Blue Valentine’ writer/director Derek Cianfrance, which again sees him reunite with Ryan Gosling, who is this time joined by another (to ape Will Ferrell’s Mugatu in ‘Zoolander’) ‘so hot right now’ Oscar nominee in the guise of Bradley Cooper, along with the combined talents of Eva Mendes, Ray Liotta, Ben Mendelsohn, Rose Byrne, Dane DeHaan, Bruce Greenwood, and Emory Cohen. The strong cast have been assembled by the success of ‘Blue Valentine’ and the involving script here, which spent several years gestating and who’s founding concept was a triptych exploring the notion of legacy, and the consequences of ones actions for years to come.

It opens with Gosling’s character Luke, a biker performing stunts in a travelling show, finding out he is actually the father of Mendez’ one year old child, leading him to quit in order to stay in town and try to provide for his new, unheralded son. The child turns out to be an unnatural devourer of enormous amounts of money, and so pretty soon he decides the only way he can possibly meet the demands of baby is to rob banks, several in fact, the money from which he finds he is just able to buy the would be new Citizen Kane of the world a cot with. This cot actually ends up as the centre of the entire universe of the film. Enter a spanner in the works, Cooper’s greenhorn cop, and the director’s intended consequences begin to be unveiled.

The film has been shot with a lot of fairly modern styles, close up camera work at times and shaky cam for example, but here they work pretty well for the most part, helping to give a feel for the adrenaline fuelled, hell for leather ride on a motorcycle after a bank robbery, and so forth, although the mix of these techniques and the fading in and out of music with diegetic sound, I think could have used a bit of tweaking. Slight plot issues aside, the story is good, but it’s really brought to life by the cast and crew – indeed I’d put this down as the first early awards contender of the year, although I wonder if it wouldn’t have been a little more effective with a truncation around twenty five minutes before the end, the completion of the third act feels a little too long and a little over the top.

Everyone is good in this, including newcomer Emory Cohen who comes across as a young Tom Hardy in many ways, there may even be a nod in that direction and Nolan’s Batman trilogy with Cohen saying ‘Why so serious?’ in a rather creepy way at one point, and the naming of Ben Mendelsohn’s character, who played Daggett in ‘The Dark Knight Rises’, as Robin. Dane DeHaan may have been miscast a little, as here his character is almost identical to the one he played in ‘Chronicle’, probably also why he was offered the role in the first place though, and the appearance of Ray Liotta onscreen is a bit of a giveaway that murkier territory is about to be entered …

Incidentally, the title of the film is a translation of the Mohawk name of the city that provides the setting – Schenectady in New York state, near the capital, Albany.

The Odd life of Timothy Green  (2012)    59/100

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Rating :   59/100                                                                     105 Min        U

There is a wonderful heart to this film, in that it focuses on a young family who find out they will never be able to have children and so, in an evening of cathartic desperation, they decide to write out all the things they imagine their child would have been, kind, ‘honest to a fault’ etc. and then they bury the list in an old wooden box in the back garden. A mysterious rain falls and up springs Timothy Green, their fully fledged nine or so years old son from the back garden, replete with leaves genetically attached to his calves.

It’s a nice idea, and the film from there on deals with issues of early, and abrupt, parenthood, and family relations and expectations. Unfortunately, it does so in an all too breezy way, and for the most part the story doesn’t prove engaging. The final third does deliver more on the emotional side of things and it is a spirited performance from the family members – Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Garner as the parents, and CJ Adams as Green, with a host of other recognisable faces appearing throughout, including David Morse and Dianne Wiest. Overall a nice, simple film, if a little flimsy – fine for young family viewing.

Spring Breakers  (2012)    23/100

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Rating :   23/100                                                                       94 Min        18

The premise of this film seems to be the following; four dehumanised, sun blasted sluts decide they absolutely have to get to spring break in Florida to ‘find themselves’. They don’t have enough money to get there, so naturally they rob a local diner with a sledgehammer and a water pistol. Arriving at their would be nirvana, what they actually find are lots of soft and hard drugs, and lots of guns. For the most past they decide this qualifies as finding themselves and they get stuck in, with the exception of Selena Gomez who has her nice girl image to think about, and so backs out in tears after showing off her body for about forty five minutes, but before her character actually really does anything else. Not that any of the girls really have much character. James Franco makes a surprisingly good appearance as a local drug dealing gangster, who takes centre stage in one of the few decent scenes by playing the piano and singing Brittany Spears whilst the girls, sporting guns and pink balaclavas with unicorns on them, join in around him.

Style has been given the priority here, with everything feeling very dark and grimy, the music is consistent in tone from start to finish, telling us this is not going to be a happy film. It doesn’t particularly glorify the drugs or the violence, at least not overall, but it doesn’t exactly condemn them either. There are a million shots of bare breasts and the girls teasing one another suggestively in skimpy, often neon coloured, underwear, but it really isn’t sexy at all. I assume that was the idea, to present them as darker beings, stylised as a priority, but perhaps with analogies to the kind of desperate, and desperately naïve, young girls who may hedonistically put their priorities in the wrong place and delve a little too deeply into the dark places of the earth, on spring break. If it was supposed to be sexy, then a Presbyterian nun could have done a better job.

There’s no particular story here, just girls, guns and a creative overwhelming darkness that makes everything about the film unappealing, the Brittany moment aside. There is constant overuse of the sound of a gun reloading loudly between scenes too, which is incredibly grating, as is the similarly irritating repeated voiceover from Franco saying ‘Spring break, forever’. Unless you have a particular craving for the flesh of Franco, Gomez, or Vanessa Hudgens who is unrecognisable as one of the girls (the other two are played by Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine – wife of the film’s writer and director Harmony Korine), avoid this one like the plague.

In the House / Dans la Maison  (2012)    59/100

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Rating :   59/100                                                                     105 Min        15

Arriving on the back of 2010’s ‘Potiche’, this is the latest French language film from director Francois Ozon, based on the play ‘The Boy in the Last Row’, by Juan Mayorga. It stars Fabrice Luchini as Germain, a slightly jaded failed novelist, now appropriately teaching English at the ‘Gustave Flaubert High School’, wherein he encounters a promising young student, Claude (Ernst Umhauer), whose potential gift reawakens a kind of hopeful excitement in his teacher, as he effectively takes him on as his protégé. The only problem is, his writing is a little subversive, and concerns the family of another pupil, creating a story within a story with the viewer not always sure what is real and what is fiction.

Unfortunately, the prose about this family, updates from which Claude continually hands to his teacher for feedback, which is supposed to draw the audience in, much as it is doing to the onscreen readers (Germain’s wife, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, also partakes), simply isn’t that interesting. The unfolding melodrama unconvincingly overstates both the skill of Claude, and the susceptibility of the adults around him so that, ultimately, it just becomes a little silly, a little hollow, and ironically, as Germain goes to greater and greater lengths to explain what makes a good story to his eager pupil, the characters onscreen become increasingly two dimensional.