Tag Archives: 76

Spooks : The Greater Good  (2015)    76/100

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Rating :   76/100                                                                     104 Min        15

Anyone familiar with the TV series this is based on (which ran on the BBC from 2002 – 2011) will no doubt remember with fondness the show’s winning identifier – you never knew when one of the main characters would get completely annihilated. It made for an exciting watch and it felt more realistic too, given the central players, the spooks, are all MI5 intelligence agents engaged in bullet laden espionage and intense skulduggery. Indeed, I remember getting a boxed set for a season I’d missed and questioning if I’d picked up the right thing, thinking ‘Wait a minute – none of the characters on the front cover of this are in the next season’, didn’t exactly bode well for their survival chances. Speaking of which, anybody remember Keeley Hawes in the series? She was definitely a prime reason for watching it as well …

The film, the first and hopefully not the last big-screen outing, very much follows in that spirit – there are many instances of ‘hmm, are you about to get shot right now?’ and the plot unfolds at a tense pace with enough clues to make you feel like you might be solving the mystery at hand, and yet there’s enough going on to drive the equation just ahead of the audience too.

The central plot involves series stalwart Harry (Peter Firth) taking the heat for a botched op and enlisting the help of someone outwith the agency, Will Holloway (Kit Harington, who is happily on form here), to investigate what really happened, as a serial terrorist and worldwide most wanted man is left at large to plan his next large scale attack. The focus is very much on the twists and turns of the story and it’s easy to get carried along with the constant energy throughout – equally it should also prove exciting enough to forgive the occasional moments where the agents don’t really seem to do a terribly professional job. Though, they are all basically red shirts anyway so I guess it’s to be expected really. Good fun.

American Sniper  (2014)    76/100

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Rating :   76/100                                                                      132 Min       15

Clint Eastwood’s latest directorial effort has replicated the success of many of its predecessors by finding its way into the Oscars race (best film and best actor for Bradley Cooper), this time around though it has been beleaguered by controversy over its portrayal of both the war in Iraq following nine eleven and also the accuracy of the depiction of real life central character Chris Kyle, the titular American sniper and indeed the most successful one in US history going by his number of kills. I don’t think the naysayers are in this case justified – I fail to see how anyone can view the film as anything other than a very strong statement against war in general, and as for the content and the focus on one side of the conflict, well, there is a pretty big clue in the title as to what one can expect from the plot.

Oddly enough, there is no back story to any of the reputed 255 kills that we see Kyle ratchet up and many of the details to do with individual events are inventions or elaborations, though nothing that doesn’t fit with the setting, and throughout the movie there is a narrative following an enemy sniper which is purely to make the story more engaging, although the sniper himself did exist. These changes work well, the film is genuinely quite exciting in some places – evoking similarities between it and ‘Zero Dark Thirty‘, and the license taken doesn’t interfere with the central concepts of what the condition of war in general is like to fight through and what the lasting effects can be for the combatants (civilians and the wider political context are very much not the focus here). The elements of jingoism are to be utterly expected, we are after all watching men going in to a war zone where their lives are guaranteed to be in jeopardy. Some of the editing is more reminiscent of the kind of way a traditional action film might be put together, but it’s the mere tiniest distraction from the seriousness of the film.

Where the film does fall down, however, is with the role of the ‘weepy moaning wife’ left behind whilst her husband endures hell. Sienna Miller has the rather joyless task of playing the part and although it certainly makes sense that she would be concerned for her husband and want him to stop returning to the war zone, she is just relentless from even before they have had their first date. She is about as stereotyped as they come and bemoaning how terrible soldiers are for potential mates doesn’t apparently stop her from eagerly bedding, tying the knot with and then opening her oven door for them, not to mention then living off their pay check. Nonetheless, this is a well made and powerful film – one that very unusually deliberately invites you to look up more about its central character, and Cooper is great in delivering a performance that one can very easily imagine as typifying the attitudes and experiences of many young American men signing up for the army. He even manages to convey that perhaps Kyle may not have been the sharpest tool in the shed at times, assuming this was deliberate of course ….

Pride  (2014)    76/100

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Rating :   76/100                                                                     120 Min        15

A fantastic, moving and historically fascinating British drama chronicling the gay community of London’s attempt to help the Welsh miners picketing in 1984 as part of the larger nation-wide miner’s strike, one which encapsulated a major attack on the Thatcher government of the day and whose outcome would affect the fabric of British commerce forevermore. The community see a commonality between their struggle for the promotion of gay rights and the fight that the miners are engaged in, and when their good intentions are originally rebuffed they decide to take their money direct to the source – rural Wales, where not everyone is quite as liberal and pleased to see them as they would have hoped.

Lots of good performances from the likes of Dominic West, Bill Nighy and Imelda Staunton, and a particularly strong one from Ben Schnetzer playing the leader of the London group whose single minded determination drives forth the entire narrative. The story also introduces some of the earliest diagnosed British victims of HIV, and the contrast between what happens to the people it mentions is worthy of a film in its own right. This is one of the best treatments of inclusivity and equality in recent memory, with great moments like when one of the local Welsh girls breaks out into song in a crowded hall and everyone feels compelled to join in, as well as a fascinating political backdrop that certainly has strong echoes with the Tory government in power now, as well as interesting titbits of information, like how the same seam of coal runs along the Atlantic connecting Wales, Spain and North America.

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.

Life of Pi  (2012)    76/100

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Rating :   76/100                                                                     127 Min        PG

A visually rich and remarkable tale with more philosophy to it than is immediately apparent. The visuals had to be great for this to really succeed, featuring as it does our young hero Pi (played by Suraj Sharma doing a very good job for his very first acting role) trapped on a lifeboat with a tiger, adrift somewhere in the Pacific ocean. Maybe about two thirds of the story take place on the lifeboat, so there is a certain drag element, and the film could have done with a little more trimming perhaps losing around fifteen-twenty minutes or so. This is made all the more problematic by the fact that we know Pi will survive this ordeal as he himself is retelling it to us, via the acting talent of Bollywood superstar Irrfan Khan.

Despite all this, the mystery over what the movie may be trying to tell us (we are told that it is a tale that will make us believe in God) together with the central performance and the abundance of wonderful cinematography, should be enough to stave off the occasional pang of boredom and bring the audience, mostly awake, to the author and director’s conclusion. Based on the Man Booker price winning novel from Yann Martel, and directed by Oscar winner Ang Lee (he won for 2005’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’), ‘Life of Pi’ has been nominated for several Oscars itself, including best picture, and best director again for Lee. Interestingly, at one point in the story the lifeboat comes ashore on an island which has a wondrous pool that fills with a deadly acid at the onset of night – this may seem fantastical, but there are colourful pools in the Galapagos Islands that are indeed full of acid, whether or not they function as the ones in the story is another matter…..