From director David Mackenzie (‘Young Adam’ 03, ‘Perfect Sense’ 11) and very sensibly filmed in chronological order, this at least attempts to show the progression within prison of an extremely violent character, from the young, hyper aggressive newcomer on the wing with experience of prison tactics, to the member of an inmate ‘anger management’ group, something that makes him feel part of something and we can see the inklings of potential reform appear.
There is the distinct feel of something made for the movies here, with the violence and goings on accentuated for that purpose, and it is debatable how much of a character progression we actually see, indeed it is very difficult to get behind the protagonist at all in the beginning and unusually for a prison film we actually want to see the guards take him round the back and give him a good kicking. We eventually learn that our main character, Eric (Jack O’connell), has a dark past of abuse and that his own father, played by Ben Mendelsohn, is imprisoned on the same wing with him, and utlimately although it is well put together and acted, it never really completely escapes from that feeling of ‘is this just a little too much to get behind or really believe’.
The term ‘starred up’, we are told, refers to someone who has been marked as an up and coming leader, and in terms of a remorseless pathological killer it certainly fits Eric, though not exactly new territory for O’connell if you have seen the very memorable films ‘Eden Lake’ (08) and ‘Tower Block’ (12). Arguably a better and just as gritty, but not as well publicised, recent prison film is ‘Offender’ (12).
Why, why, why oh why did Kate Winslet agree to do this film? This is beyond abysmal. It begins by suggesting it might be going down into ‘Straw Dogs’ (71 & 2011) territory, but then it quickly does a U-turn into the realm of Nicholas Sparks (although Joyce Maynard actually wrote the book this is based on). This essentially tells the story of an escaped prisoner (Josh Brolin) who abducts Winslet and her young son in order to hide out at their house for the evening, where he ‘has’ to tie her up, even though he’s a nice guy you understand, so that it looks like he gave them no choice should someone come in. Within a few days she has been banged so many times by him that she is quite willing to give up everything and take her son out of school, take all their money out of the bank, and flee with him across the border to Canada.
It’s ridiculous, I’m surprised he didn’t try to have it off with the boy at the same time and manage to sell it to the pair of them as normal. To make the clichéd point that perhaps someone who has been sent to jail may still be a nice person, and someone walking around free may not be, we see a mentally handicapped child left over at the house by his mother to be looked after by Winselt and co for the day. Not fearing the mentally handicapped child’s ability to recognise him as a CONVICTED FELON ON THE LAM Brolin teaches the kid baseball and gives him, presumably, the best day of his live with a ‘real man’ father figure, much as he presents to Winslet’s son. On the return of the mother, the child achieves the impossible and recognises who Brolin is and dutifully tries to inform his loving mother, who, in order to shut him up whilst she is talking, turns around and SOCKS HIM IN THE FACE, before cheerfully saying goodbye and carting the dazed and befuddled child out of the door.
This child abuse doesn’t end with the loving parents of the town though, a local police officer (played by none other than Dawson, James Van Der Beek) after seeing Winslet’s child casually walking down the street actually threatens to arrest him unless he gets in the car so that he can give him ‘a ride home’. Hmm. After Brolin begins his attempted rape/seduction of Winslet by tying her up slowly in front of her kid, he follows this up with the old one-two of baking absurdly rich and perfect peach pie, an age old seduction technique guaranteed to charm the pants off any sex starved middle aged house wife, especially if they can’t cook themselves. In the years to come we see Tobey Maguire appear as Winslet’s boy in the future and guess what he does for a living? He bakes THE SAME FUCKING PIE on an industrial scale. GET. TO. FUCK.
This is only director Jonathan Glazer’s third feature film (the other two, ‘Sexy Beast’ 2000 and ‘Birth’ 04 are definitely both worth watching too) and as an adaptation of Michel Faber’s 2000 novel of the same name it’s his most ambitious project yet. The essence of the plot is that aliens have come to Earth and managed to don themselves in our skin, and they go around collecting live human specimens for some nefarious purpose. Interesting, but nothing especially new – however the delivery mechanism is uncomfortably captivating. Scarlett Johansson plays the primary alien honey trap and we watch her drive around the streets of Glasgow in a white transit van (it was nice of the aliens to target our mercurial ned population) trying her hand as a pick up artist, though one imagines her perhaps not having too much difficulty with this, she is after all Scarlett Johansson even with a black wig on. The necessity for the wig becomes obvious when we realise that some of the film is actually comprised of real footage and features members of the public rather than actors.
I love this concept – not only is it daringly unique but, especially with what happens to the men she seduces, it is a very powerful statement on what could lie beneath the skin of any potential partner, whether the viewer wants to interpret that in terms of disease, personality or both. Does it also perhaps imply Scarlett Johansson has a fetish for Scottish men? She is welcome to a cup of tea courtesy of The Red Dragon if so, although I am reliably informed by one of my pregnant female friends (I impregnate human females on a regular basis) that miss Johansson is expecting, so many congratulations to her and her fiancé.
As the film progresses it moves away from this concept somewhat to focus on the character of the main alien herself (assuming it has a gender) as she has a bit of a moral/personality crisis. This is where the film is at its weakest – we spend a lot of time with the director trying to convey this change across to us, but it usually amounts to little more than the principal lead staring into space, or at a wall, and the sci-fi concept of something non human coming to consider their humanity is something that most audiences will be overly familiar with.
There are plenty of moments of darkness and just as many of contemplation, creating several very, very memorable scenes, and there are many physically brazen performances from the cast to accompany them, none more so than from the leading lady herself. She is wonderful throughout, but in this physical aspect she was also the perfect choice. Consistently held up as an ideal in terms of both beauty and sex appeal in the real world, we see her examine her naked skin and body in the mirror in growing curiosity, though it is an opportunity half realised as personally I would have liked to see more focus on this aspect – not for the sake of perving but rather to show that everyone, even the most supposedly flawless person, can find parts of their bodies that are not ‘ideal’ and from certain angles look pretty far from it. The film does at least delve into this denuding of perfection.
A movie like this is always worth going to see if only to appreciate an artist trying to create something original. It’s largely a success and it will certainly stay with you for a long time, just be prepared for lots of nudity and sinister, yet not entirely alien, concepts.
The latest film from Terry Gilliam is entirely autorepresentative even if one was initially unaware he was at the helm, set as it is in a dystopian Blade Runner-esque future on Earth and replete with the sort of cynical corporate outlook and the many imaginative, varied and urban physical props that consistently appear in his work, ‘Brazil’ (85) and ’12 Monkeys’ (95) in particular, and also his sense of humour (we see posters reading ‘The church of Batman the Redeemer needs You!’). Here, the story focuses on a social outsider, Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz), who lives alone in an abandoned church in the heart of town, and the film opens with him begging the management at his work (some kind of mass processing plant of intellectual/virtual goods) to allow him to work from home which, he argues, would be much more productive for the company as there would be no time lost in transit etc. and he would prefer it as he wouldn’t have to be surrounded by people he doesn’t want anything to do with. At least, that is the assumption as we see him suffer great difficulty under normal social conditions and continually use ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ in conversation. The head of the company (Matt Damon, who last worked with Gilliam on ‘The Brothers Grimm’ 05) comes to the conclusion that he is borderline insane and so consents to his wish, so long as he works on ‘The Zero Theorem’, a project which is notorious for driving people bonkers and so he figures Qohen has nothing to lose anyway.
The opening third of the film is a little too ungrounded to work properly – we see Qohen at a party, for example, where the socialites there are dressed in what passes for fashionable garb, each holding modern tablets while they dance as if they’re sending out some social signal trending in the future, whether it be simply an alternative statement or some kind of status symbol, relationship or otherwise, we don’t know, and that’s the problem – it’s too loose, an attempted commentary on the dominance of technology and perhaps social media in our lives at the expense of human interaction, but it’s too vague to have any real meaning.
Eventually though, the film settles and finds more resonance with modernity and physics, in particular the ‘big crunch’ theory which would see the universe eventually contract and end with the opposite of a big bang (the universe is currently expanding, but different, conflicting ideas about its future abound). Qohen, we learn, has been waiting all his life for the one call that will explain the meaning of his life to him, but is ironically forced to work obsessively on the imposed Zero Theorem, which attempts to prove that the sum total of everything, all knowledge, matter and experience, amounts to absolutely and figuratively nothing, and thus everything is pointless.
As we watch him work at his computer we see him trying to fit endless arrays of boxes with formulae written on them into structures comprised of many such boxes – when he puts the right one into the right place he ‘solves’ that part, bringing order to chaos, but when he makes a mistake entropy ensues and that structure collapses, causing much mental anguish to the would be mathematician, compounded by his exponentially increasing workload, all of which threatens his already dubious mental stability.
Interestingly, this could be read in a number of ways. It will certainly seem familiar to the many programmers out there who work under such infuriating circumstance all the time, but there is also a connection to the modern rise of ultra cynical computer games, usually found online or available as apps, that are designed with the sole purpose of tying people into them, forcing them to invest more and more of, not just their time, but also their money into the game and for no real gain in terms of enjoyment or any satisfaction to be gleamed from the gameplay, simply to keep consumers using their product as much as possible. The ‘grind’ as gamers will often refer to some instances of this phenomenon. All of these games are a complete waste of time, and the creator’s main job is to dress it up as something rewarding so that you don’t realise just how bad it is until you’ve already been playing for a while, and they quite often target a younger market that are easier to hook. At the same time, it also has echoes of the drive in modern physics to search for a ‘unified theory’ of everything, as currently two of our major understandings of the universe, namely relativity and quantum theory, do not match up with one another, meaning something is wrong with at least one of them somewhere.
Thus, the film becomes more relevant and more interesting as it progresses. Matt Damon hires a digital prostitute Bainsley (Mélanie Thierry) to keep Qohen interested in the project, presumably also to relieve some of his pent up rage, but the two develop real feelings for one another, throwing the unstable variables of love and desire into the equation. Here too the science fiction aspect really works, as Bainsley explains she doesn’t actually engage in any physical intercourse because it isn’t safe but focuses instead on the cerebral, and eventually we see the pair of them connect themselves to the internet where they can experience the real thing in virtual reality – something which could become available in the not too distant future with current technology able to ‘read thoughts’ (electrical impulses, see below) and deliver an element of tactile sensation, and with experiments to link this to cybersex and the adult entertainment industry being conducted by various interested parties.
A delightfully dark and yet hopeful film in some ways, as we at least see Qohen’s passion for something compel him to strive ever forward, all counterbalanced by the warmth Bainsley provides, and so long as you can live with its flirtation with whimsy, there are a lot of nice touches to appreciate too. Well acted throughout, also with David Thewlis, Tilda Swinton and Lucas Hedges in support.
Director Brian Percival’s dramatisation of Markus Zusak’s best selling 2006 novel of the same name is a remarkable example of how one or two critical errors at the end of a movie can do irreparable damage to any and all good work prior to it. The plot centres around a young ten year old girl, Liesel Meminger, given away by her mother to foster parents, the Hubermanns, living in Nazi controlled Germany. As war approaches and then begins, a young Jewish man in desperate need of shelter arrives and the family agrees to hide him in the basement, where he forms a close friendship with Liesel who shares with him her new found love of reading, fuelled by her regular theft of novels from the Mayor’s house and all instigated when she took, despite being illiterate, a book accidentally dropped by the grave of her brother, who passed away along the journey to the Hubermann’s town, perhaps in a desperate attempt to have something to remember him by.
Despite the grim setting, there is a kind of light and slightly airy feel to the film, but rather than paint too rosy a picture it should make it more palatable for younger viewers, which is good since it’s kind of aimed at them thematically with the focus on Liesel growing up against the backdrop of the war, and there’s still enough dark elements present to assuage the demands of history. The film is narrated intermittently by Death, voiced by Roger Allam, but unfortunately this kind of sees the Grim Reaper come over as a little too posh and sanctimonious, a tad incongruent with what one might imagine Death personified would sound like, meanwhile Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson give sterling performances as the Hubermanns, but the lion’s share of credit has to go to young Canadian actress Sophie Nélisse who embodies Liesel perfectly.
One or two decisions toward the end, and a scene that really should have been reshot, sadly destroys much of the impact of the film. It isn’t really fair that this should be the case, but it is the feeling you walk out of the cinema with that mostly shapes your view of a film. It’s still quite good, but it was close to being something more.
Another journey into the mindscape of Jim Jarmusch travelling along the familiar pathways of his love for music and physics, but this time delivered via the unexpectedly ethereal, and at times amusing, blackened world of vampires. Tom Hiddleston (Adam) and Tilda Swinton (Eve) are the lead vamps and have been lovers for countless decades, with John Hurt and Mia Wasikowska in support, aided by Anton Yelchin and Jeffrey Wright as two of the few mortals in the film. The performances are great, especially from the leads, but the use of music throughout the film is very well balanced creating not only a sombre tone for the shadowlands of their lives, but also a unique ambience for long reflective moments, as we spend most of the film in Adam’s home musing along with his lugubrious melancholy at the state of the world.
His home is in a rundown area of Detroit, where he lives as a mysterious and reclusive musician lamenting on the fact that his distancing himself from commercial interests only seems to make his music even more popular, which is the perfect setting, subtly adding to the not so cheery vein running through the film after Detroit last year was forced to declare itself bankrupt, the largest scale event of its kind in US history, with her population considerably under half of what it was in the 1950s. The vampirism is part anchor and delivery mechanism for the philosophy, but it could also easily be read as a thinly veiled metaphor for drug use and dependence, especially when they speak of contamination of the blood supply, in today’s HIV conscious world.
Continuing the protagonists commentary on the general malaise of mankind, comparing his centuries of scientific learning and cultural experiences to the modern world, we find mention of the work and theories of nineteenth century electronics pioneer Nikola Tesla, just as in Jarmusch’s ‘Coffee and Cigarettes’ (David Bowie gives a nice turn playing him in ‘The Prestige’ (06) as well, incidentally), and when Adam points to the mess of cables and wires around the place that pass for a supply of power and waves it off as woefully rudimentary and wasteful, he is absolutely right. In today’s world, the technology and know how exist to completely transform the way we live, making it a hundred times more economically viable as well as environmentally friendly – for those with a Facebook account take a look at this clip from Physicist TV to see what I mean, or watch the excellent documentary ‘Who Killed the Electric Car’ (06) to see how big business stamps its regressive boot down on technology that threatens its profits.
For fans of Jarmusch this is a must see, and for everyone else it’s worth delving into for the shades of legitimate grey contrasted with the unhurried, yet enduring and passionate romance of the two main characters.
The first animated theatrical release from Rainmaker Entertainment, which hits UK shores over a year after its release in the States – was it worth the wait? Well, not especially, but for its target audience of young kids it should prove visually and thematically entertaining enough, with the occasional nod to films like ‘The Artist’ (11) and ‘Monsters’ (10) to try and keep adults interested.
The story focuses on two alien brothers, one full of machismo but not the sharpest tool in the shed and the other a tech nerd and family man (his son is initially more impressed by the showmanship of his brother) at mission control – when the former is captured by the US military (many of their number have mysteriously gone missing on Earth) the more cautious brother is forced to ‘man up’ and go into the field to try and rescue him. The animation is slick and colourful, and although the story is very simple, exploring the rivalry of the brothers along with the relative pros and cons of their strengths and weaknesses, it should hold youngster’s attention throughout, although it is unlikely to become an enduring family favourite.
With voice acting from Rob Corddry, Brendan Fraser, Sarah Jessica Parker, Jessica Alba, William Shatner and Ricky Gervais.
With the Oscars ceremony taking place in a few hours time, this was the last of the best film nominees I had left to see, and what was a very, very strong category for me has just become even more so. It’s from writer/director Spike Jonze and takes place in an immediate future that, from the technology on display, feels like it is taking place just around the corner from where we are now. Here we meet Theodore, played wonderfully by Joaquin Phoenix (who was perfect for the part), who is about to be treated to the latest innovative piece of computer software to hit the globe in the guise of an artificially intelligent operating system for his computer.
After only briefly hesitating over whether to choose a male or a female program, he is soon greeted by the sultry tones of Scarlett Johansson emanating from his computer and, understandably, he soon falls in love with ‘her’. The story thusly plays on the idea of love and the parameters of normal relationships as Theodore finds he doesn’t really need anything physical but rather someone who is completely attentive to his needs and engages him mentally, and yet he also has the option of turning her off whenever he wants to. Or at least, in the beginning he does, as the story along with the AI continues to evolve, throwing more and more food for thought at the audience.
A couple of parts of the film don’t hold up as well as the rest, the most egregious of them being when Theodore is on a date with Olivia Wilde who’s starting to feel him up but then asks a fairly reasonable question about him taking her seriously and he bottles it. If Olivia Wilde has her hands down your pants and asks if you are going to be nice to her, you simply say YES!. Or nod your head, or groan affirmatively, this is not a scenario where there is any doubt or need to think about it. Shortly before this he implies that he could be her dragon, which she likes the sound of. Must. Interview. Her.
This is an artfully delicate and incisive film with well balanced and intelligent use of its sci-fi premise, and it may just provide an upset at the Oscars …
Despite the very, very worthy story being told here, I found it difficult to properly engage with the gritty way in which it is delivered to the audience. The mostly true story of AIDS victim Ron Woodroof who finds he cannot afford the drugs which is believed would keep him alive (he is given approximately four weeks to live) and who ends up in Mexico trying desperately to get a hold of this life extending elixir. Whilst there, fate introduces him to a doctor who explains what he has been told about this miracle drug simply isn’t true, and instead he prescribes him several much simpler and much healthier substances, all of which were legal in the United States although not FDA (Food and Drug Administration) approved. Seeing not only a way to help his own health and that of others, but also a nice way to make a lot of money, he heads back up north to set up the eponymous Dallas Buyers Club.
We bear witness to the legal ramifications of his club and those like it, whilst the pharmaceutical companies still ram their product down the throats of the medical professionals and the lives of many thousands of patients are put into the balance. Some liberties have been taken with the personal story of Woodroof and his personality, there is no mention of his daughter in the film, for example, and two central characters, fellow AIDS sufferer and transsexual Rayon (Jared Leto – pictured above on the left) and romantic interest/doc with a conscience Eve (Jennifer Garner), are entirely fictional. Matthew McConaughey gives a very committed performance as Woodroof, initially a homophobic, drug abusing electrician/rodeo cowboy and general scallywag and both he and Leto are not only up for Academy Awards this season but also lost an unhealthy amount of weight for their roles.
In a way this highlights both the eerie quality of the film and yet some of its strength – when we see these two actors who do very much appear that they are not far from death’s door, there is a part of you that is shocked and forced to consider that reality for people with the disease not just then but now too, despite the improvement in our medical understanding, and yet we are simultaneously aware in the back of our minds that these two people do not have AIDS and have in fact done this to themselves. There is a sickening quality to the deed, and we have to ask – was it necessary? When Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier starred together in ‘Marathon Man’ (76) they were preparing for a scene when Hoffman declared that he was off for a run – responding to the quizzical look from his co-worker he explained that his character had been on a run just before the scene and so he had better go for one too, to which Olivier’s response was ‘There’s a reason they call it acting’. In the scenario of this film he certainly has a point, especially in the age of computers when some weight for the naked torso scenes could probably be digitally removed. Tom Hanks last year attributed his current Diabetes condition to gaining and losing weight for some of his roles in the past and one wonders if that’s true and if so just how much he regrets doing it. McConaughey has gone from strength to strength over recent years and so it’s great to see him nominated at the Oscars and it is deserved (as is Leto’s nod) but, should the industry really be encouraging this kind of thing? How long before someone goes too far and ends up seriously ill or worse, all for the sake of a film role?
I’ve posted the clip below a few times before but it’s worth repeating here due to its relevance and also to show just how much corruptive power drugs companies still wield in today’s world, with not only the medical profession but also large parts of the sports/recreation/therapy industries being driven by chants of ‘Sell, Sell, Sell’.
A huge opportunity missed here as what could have been a tight, thrilling and quite moving war piece based on a true incident taking place in Afghanistan in 2005, descends into complete farce and jingoism with the main American soldiers each being shot about five hundred times, exclaiming ‘damn it’ with each hit as if they’d merely been stung by some nettles as blood spurts everywhere all leading up to dramatic Boromir style death scenes in slow motion with the sun setting on the picturesque landscape surrounding them. The title itself completely blows much of the story as for anyone who wasn’t aware of the details (the vast majority of viewers one imagines) we know only one of the four man team survives, and the very beginning compacts this gross error by showing it is very clearly going to be Mark Wahlberg’s character Marcus Luttrell, and indeed the film is based on Luttrell’s novel recounting events as they happened on the ground (reputedly his original report put enemy troop numbers at circa 20 -30, then in his book they became more like 200, whilst an alternative novel published about the operation puts them at more like 9 or 10).
The other three combatants are played by Emile Hirsch, Taylor Kitsch and Ben Foster, and, frankly, if I died fighting for my country I’d be pretty pissed off with some of these casting choices, and the film opens, after some decent real army footage, with what seems to be some sort of homosexual soft porno with the focus on the bodies of the men instead of the camaraderie or characters. Without knowing the exact details of the events that actually occurred, their assignment according to the film was to covertly approach an Afghan village and take out a Taliban leader, or ‘the bad guys’ as they put it, thought to be there, but it many ways it seems doomed from the beginning. They quickly find the mountains are making radio communication impossible – how is it they didn’t factor that in? It surely cannot have come as a surprise. Then they encounter their first major obstacle and make a complete dog’s breakfast of it, before failing to properly conceal themselves in what seems pretty good terrain to disappear in, especially if there are only four of you. Not only this, but instead of both hiding themselves and also preparing cover where they would have the advantage, they elect to run at the superior numbers taking very little precaution with cover (but when you can take multiple bullets without even noticing I guess that’s not so much of an issue), and then, when they should once again be trying to disappear, they loudly call out to each other creating a very, very easy duck hunt for the people trying to kill them.
It ends with what is actually a very moving tribute to the real men that lost their lives there, but this is cheating – an emotional punch at the end that people are naturally going to feel and empathise with and yet it cannot make up for the majority of the film being terrible. I say the majority – the last quarter of the story has more of a heart to it, which took me by surprise, and some of the scenes at least successfully begin to set up tension, with at least one of them slightly uncomfortable viewing, as was intended by the clever way it was shot. However, when you are watching the main characters effectively play Cowboys and Indians and pretending to be riddled with lead and hit every bone of their bodies off rocks, still calmly delivering cheesy lines to one another, then the thing is sunk without any real hope of redemption. This is entirely the fault of director Peter Berg as he not only helmed the project but also wrote the screenplay, in fact, and I may be misremembering this, but I think he tells us he is the director twice during the opening credits. His last film was ‘Battleship’ (12) and this is in the same league as that, notwithstanding the real world relevance.
