Tag Archives: 2013

In Secret  (2013)    70/100

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Rating :   70/100                                                                     107 Min        15

Period drama with a dark side in this adaptation of Émile Zola’s 1867 novel ‘Thérèse Raquin’ from director Charlie Stratton and starring Elizabeth Olsen, Oscar Isaac, Jessica Lange and Tom Felton. At its heart we see a young woman coming to sexual maturity within a constrained environment, with Olsen adopted by Lange and forced to marry her son, Felton, who is often ill and not exactly a ‘sexual tyrannosaur’ (to ape Jesse Ventura’s line in ‘Predator’ 87) around the ladies. Near the beginning we see Olsen, secretly watching some yokel cutting crops in a field, furiously grinding her clit against the grass whilst she does so (we do not actually see the clit of course, I fear period drama audiences are probably not quite ready for that yet), which is great – female sexuality is still so often a marginalised and often scandalously taboo subject that it’s very refreshing to see it dealt with openly within this traditionally very conservative genre.

Moving to Paris the young couple are introduced to Oscar Isaac’s suave artist who will immediately, and rather easily it has to be said, charm the pants off of the main character, which leads to all manner of passionate and irrevocable decisions. A study in morality, sexuality and both basic human kindness and greed this is very well put together, shot and acted, in particular by Felton and multiple Oscar nominee Lange (6 times no less, with one win for lead actress in 94’s ‘Blue Sky’, and one supporting Oscar for 82’s ‘Tootsie’) and it ought to have wide ranging appeal, not simply to those with an affinity for costume pieces.

Interestingly, one scene features Olsen at her dressing table, Lange standing behind her chatting away, whilst Isaac is hidden under her skirts, conducting a conversation of his own, and the scenario together with the look on Olsen’s face, the powder on her cheeks and her contrasting striking red lipstick all create a remarkably familiar image – she would be the absolute perfect person to play Harley Quinn, aka Dr. Harleen Frances Quinzel lover of none other than Batman’s nemesis the Joker. Despite committing the potential sacrilege of putting Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman in the same movie together (not to mention allowing Zack Snyder and Ben Affleck loose on another superhero film) it’s unlikely that WB would go anywhere near the Joker for quite some time yet after Heath Ledger’s iconic Oscar winning portrayal, plus Olsen is set to appear in the Marvel Universe anyway, but you never know.

I don’t think this is from the same scene but you can see what I mean …

elizabeth-olsen-in-secret

The Wind Rises / Kaze Tachinu  (2013)    70/100

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Rating :   70/100                                                                     126 Min        PG

Written and directed by the animation legend that is Hayao Miyazaki (who retired after the film’s completion, although he also did the same thing after releasing ‘Princess Mononoke‘ …) this latest from Studio Ghibli returns to a familiar motif for the company – that of aerial flight, portraying a fictionalised biography of Jiro Horikoshi who we see literally dreaming of becoming an aeronautical engineer in Japan in the decades leading up to the Second World War, and we watch as he realises his dream, creating planes far greater than anything Japan had to offer previously, but at the same time they are perverted by the powers that be into machines of death and destruction. With the time and setting such as they are, there are constant haunting echoes of the disastrous future awaiting everyone, again a theme not new to the animation house. The film is very heavily burdened by a lacking narrative that really tests the audience’s patience, but it does just manage to salvage itself via, eventually, the introduction of a love story with a girl Jiro once saved when they were both younger, and who is now suffering from TB. This adds to the whole transient snapshot of creativity and life we’re watching, before the billowing flames of war burn all, and the variety of the skilled animation together with a very fitting score and sound design ensure it’s still a film of merit, but it probably should have been quite a bit better.

Blue Ruin  (2013)    73/100

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Rating :   73/100                                                                       90 Min        15

Funded on Kickstarter by its writer and director Jeremy Saulnier, this is a study of vengeance and the cycle of violence that it can begin. Dwight (Macon Blair) has never been able to deal with the murder of his parents by a man whom he learns is about to be released from jail. At the film’s beginning we see Dwight living out of his car, rummaging in garbage for anything edible, and we learn later that he hides from remaining family members, fully aware of the shameful state he has allowed to become the norm. The knowledge that the person he holds responsible for everything is to be set free though, galvanises his long gestating hatred and he plots brutal recriminations.

Well shot and acted, this doesn’t pull its punches, dealing in a very real way with the harsh reality of violence, hate and anger. Some of the scenes aren’t as successful as they could have been, in terms of character reactions and the staging of some of the action, and it would perhaps have not been amiss to show more moments of inflection from the protagonist as he continues his descent into hell, but this is nevertheless believable overall, and compelling throughout.

Tarzan  (2013)    11/100

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Rating :   11/100                                                                       94 Min        PG

Third rate animation that can only have secured a wide release based on the fact they were adapting Edgar Rice Burrough’s most famous character for his first big-screen outing since Disney did a pretty great job back in 99. The backgrounds and some of the animated creatures in this are good – but the humans look terrible, and the story is just hopeless. Tarzan, for example, is a already a young boy of about eight or nine and able to speak fluently when his parents bite the dust in the jungle and a Great Ape adopts him, which is a fairly major departure from the novel and yet still sees Tarzan able to communicate with the animals and swing from the trees by the time he is in his late teens and he meets a ridiculously sexualised Jane, who’s constant tight fitting shorts and Barbie doll breasts seems to even attract the amorous attention of her father.

Central to the plot is the fanciful notion of a crashed meteor that, if found and harnessed, could be a source of limitless power, but this same power can prove destructive if disturbed as Tarzan’s loving parents that take him on a perilous journey into the middle of nowhere find out. This crashed meteor also looks rather like the island thingy at the end of ‘Superman Returns’ (06). There really is no skill or class whatsoever here, I wouldn’t even recommend it for the youngest and least critical of children, just rent Disney’s far superior version instead. With Kellan Lutz and Spencer Locke as principal voice leads.

Tracks  (2013)    73/100

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Rating :   73/100                                                                     112 Min        12A

Wonderful film that shows the true to life adventure of one young woman’s determined journey through the deserts of Western Australia in the mid 1970’s, from Alice Springs in the heart of the country all the way to the Indian Ocean. The woman in question is Robyn Davidson, played in a fairly gutsy portrayal here by Mia Wasikowska, who became famous as ‘the camel lady’ through her stoic decision to try and travel alone with only a few camels to carry her luggage as company, despite not having a penny to her name to begin with. Eventually, she is forced to accept funding from National Geographic and begrudgingly has to occasionally suffer the company of their photographer Rick Smolan (Adam Driver), leading to one of the most interesting moments when she can’t stand his presence and talking anymore and so decides to shag him to just to get him to shut up. It’s certainly a novel approach to seduction.

Lurking behind this sudden jumping of her companion’s bones is a crawling loneliness that echoes throughout the film and eats away at the main character, who is kind of making the grandest statement of just how much it defines her, and we see shades of her past with the suicide of her mother that underpins her young adult relation to the world. The film takes its time and consistently treats us to views of the austere landscape whilst a very well judged score plays throughout, interspersed with moments of human interaction and reflection, and this technique works really well for the narrative, with the balance and tone suitably adjudged by director John Curran (‘The Painted Veil’ 06, ‘Stone’ 10), and it certainly shows lots of promise for debut screenwriter Marion Nelson. Definitely worth going to see.

Locke  (2013)    72/100

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Rating :   72/100                                                                       85 Min        15

An extremely focused and potent film about consequences and responsibility. The entirety of this film takes place within the car of Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy) as he drives away from work and not to home as usual, but to deal with the long shadow cast by some of his previous actions. Although it does not explicitly say so for a little while, it’s fairly obvious from the beginning that this event is the birth of an unplanned for child, one that Locke’s loving wife and current two sons do not know about. We learn the central character has issues of abandonment with regards to his own father, and so he makes several potentially life changing decisions as events pile on top of one another – he was due to pour the largest amount of concrete in Europe ever the following morning and has to prep someone else to do it via phone, for example, and he is partly forced and partly decides for himself that the time has come to confront everything.

The way we hear all of this play out via hands free phone conversations as he’s driving works really well, and it’s quite heart breaking listening to some of the reactions. Hardy is wonderful in the role, sporting a Welsh accent here, one with echoes of Bane in the background which kind of fits with his first name of Ivan, and both he and the script hold and carry interest from beginning to end, resulting in a captivating and meaningful drama.

I shan’t list the names of the actors in voice support as it’s actually better not to match faces to them as you watch the film. Movies that concentrate on only one or two characters in restricted settings are usually always worth watching – see the original ‘Sleuth’ (72), ‘Closet Land’ (91) and ‘Buried’ (10).

The Love Punch  (2013)    30/100

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Rating :   30/100                                                                       94 Min        12A

The title encapsulates the only striking or interesting thing about this film, in fact the whole thing plays out like a long winded joke with no punch line, told by a friend that you only listen to until the end out of politeness. It’s a comedy crime caper that sees a separated couple, played by Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson, forced to join forces again to try and recapture their financial loses after Brosnan’s company is bought over and then immediately liquidated, annihilating the family savings. This leads them on a jaunt to Paris and a life of crime as they opt to try and steal the money back any way they can, helped out by their mutual friends, played by Timothy Spall and Celia Imrie. Will the ex-lovers also manage to recapture their passions of yester-year?

Indeed.

The Last Days on Mars  (2013)    56/100

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Rating :   56/100                                                                       98 Min        15

A zombie film set on Mars, not unusual in terms of the genre but slightly so in terms of its general release at the cinema and not straight to DVD.  Mankind has recently established a base on the red planet and the present crew are due to be shipped back to Earth for the next staff rotation when one of them happens upon sings of microbiological life. This life form, as one would expect, starts to turn the humans into flesh eating zombies that are impervious to the atmospheric conditions of Mars and the laws of science and nature in general. You can tell who is going to meet their undeath first based on their acting calibre. It’s not all that bad, is just isn’t interesting, original or tense enough to be particularly worthwhile, nor is it sadly bad enough to be especially good fun. Watch ‘Mission to Mars’ (2000) instead, which was also ropey in places but was great to watch, or the Mars episode of Doctor Who with the aliens in the water which was also good apart from the completely nonsensical ending. With Liev Schreiber, Olivia Williams, Elias Koteas, Romola Garai and Johnny Harris.

The Double  (2013)    65/100

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Rating :   65/100                                                                       93 Min        15

The second film written and directed by Richard Ayoade (probably best known for playing Moss in ‘The IT Crowd’) and starring Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska in the central roles with many of the cast from his previous film, the wonderful ‘Submarine’ (10), appearing in support. The story is an adaptation of the novella of the same name by Dostoyevsky, first published in 1846, concerning the appearance one day of a man’s exact physical double, here at his place of work, who embodies everything he isn’t – the double is confident, the double is admired, the double is brassy to the point of being criminally indulgent and offensive but people love him for it, and so on.

It’s great to see a new filmmaker experimenting with their own ideas, as is the case here, with plenty of room for personal interpretation opening open as we see the double zero in on the original character’s love interest. Is this imposter what he would become if he were to drastically change his personality to become more of a traditional alpha male? Would such an attempted change result in an almost schizophrenic interim period, or perhaps even a corruptive downward spiral?

Shot within a fairly constrictive local environment of workplace/tower block/diner and with consistent dark hues of yellow and green, the piece has the vibrant ambivalence of feeling both clinical and accessible – largely sold to us by terrific acting from Eisenberg himself, no mean feat when we consider to pull it off he had to do each take twice and continually match the timing with his invisible counterpart to perfection.

Unfortunately, experimenting too wildly can easily go awry, and here Ayoade has admitted that he struggled the most with the ending, which alas comes across onscreen as something which had up until then been interesting and thought provoking descends into a series of fairly nonsensical events and it ends up just being too whimsical and loose. Asides from the final furlong, it shows a lot of promise for the fledgling writer/director though, and it should still prove fairly interesting if you’re looking for something a little bit different.

20 Feet From Stardom  (2013)    66/100

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Rating :   66/100                                                                       91 Min        12A

I find it difficult to believe this was the best documentary of 2013, winning as it did the Oscar for that year. This delivers very little in the way of emotional connection or any especially revelatory or indeed relevant discussion of the material, and it couldn’t be more consciously biased when it comes to the ethnicity of the people involved. It deals with the story of back up singers trying to make it big by themselves as solo artists, but we only really hear from black singers, in fact despite comparing them to white girls at the beginning of their career near the start of the film one could certainly be forgiven for thinking there weren’t any white back up singers for decades, and indeed this is the only time the film touches on the issue of race within the industry – it seems to be suggesting its importance and then ignoring it, whilst underpinning it with its limited spread of interviewees, and since it’s purportedly about the facet of the business in general it feels slightly off. We hear from one white girl who mostly talks about how great the others are and toward the end we finally see her singing and the camera keeps jerking back to her as it inevitably pans to the black women beside her, as if someone was saying to the cameraman ‘whoops, no, better get some more shots of the token white girl in there!’. I can only suppose that white guilt after watching ’12 Years a Slave’ played a part in guiding this to success. There is also a suggestion of inherent differences in talent – are black women universally more powerful than white women? I shall have to investigate …

This race issue is kind of a sidenote though – the real problem is that it feels like we’re watching a bunch of people bemoan their ill fortunes (some of them are quite content with their lives and the successes they had though) because it was tough for them and they didn’t make it to the top despite being really talented (they are all amazing singers), but you find yourself thinking ‘what did you expect’? They were going into the music industry for goodness sake, and in no way does their experiences make them unique or indeed differentiate their path from anyone else going into any creative profession, success is never guaranteed for anyone going down that road, often regardless of talent, one absolutely needs a strategy and the music industry perhaps more than any other is full of talentless success stories that just played the game well. The women who are interviewed seem united by an inherent lack of any kind of stratagem, they either relied solely on their vocal skill or on labels, and one of them seems particularly aggressive in her approach to dealing with other people in the industry, it would be surprising if that wasn’t a contributory factor to not hitting the big time.

The central aspect of the film doesn’t work and it’s impossible to feel much for the women who’s stories we hear, or perhaps even really believe them – they start moaning about their bodies being objectified (once again, music industry, hello), which is very much jumping on a modern day band wagon, when one of the interviewers, the only time they interject to pick them up on something, says ‘But didn’t you do Playboy?’, to which the answer is ‘Oh yeah, there was that.’ Ha! In the background though, we do find more interesting material, smaller discoveries about the world of backup singing lying by the wayside of the main narrative, and there is a lot of good music in there too, but it’s so limited – I don’t recall there being any mention of Tina Turner, for example, who famously started out singing backup for her husband to be Ike Turner, and then who did make it big as a solo artist, which is a fairly unforgivable omission.

One of the best moments is Merry Clayton talking about her role singing for ‘Gimme Shelter’, one of the Stones’ most iconic tracks …

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